On Monday, Saber Interactive announced that the upcoming zombie swarm shooter World War Z would be released on the Epic Store—and perhaps not Steam, although that was entirely speculative on my part. Today it turned the focus back to the more practical problems of dealing with the dead, with a new trailer showcasing the game's six different classes, each of which brings its own unique weapons, abilities, and playstyles to the undead massacre.
I'll be honest: The trailer did not help me much in distinguishing between most of the classes. You've got your Ninja and your Medic, but after that it's pretty much Guns, Guns, Guns, and, uh, Guns. Fortunately, there's also a press release that divvies them up with a little more detail.
The Slasher is all about melee—melee is quiet, and quiet is good. (Remember this?) The Medic can heal teammates from a safe distance with the "Stim Pistol," which is handy when you're trying to put the brakes on the zombie apocalypse. And on the Gun Guys side, which is where the confusion lies, you've got:
- The Gunslinger, "loaded with an arsenal of weapon damage and ammo-boosting perks to mow down the dead."
- The Hellraiser, who "come armed with C4 and other tools for effective crowd control."
- The Fixer, who starts matches "with an exploding ammo cases and several teammate ammo-restoring perks."
- And finally, The Exterminator, "armed with Molotov cocktails and increased fire damage," and an intense desire to watch things burn.
On paper, at least, it's a fairly conventional Team Fortress-style class breakdown—Pyro, Demo, Engineer, and so forth—but without the informative titles or clearly distinctive styles of play. That's not necessarily a problem, beyond trying to figure out who's doing what in this video: World War Z is, as far as I know, meant to be a semi-realistic survival shooter, so relatively minor class variations based on loadouts makes a lot more sense than, say, wailing on a fixed gun emplacement with a cartoonishly oversized wrench.
Update: Saber Interactive has also confirmed our earlier speculation that World War Z will not be coming to Steam: "The PC version of World War Z will be exclusive to the Epic Games Store."
