The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a blast to play and get fit in. When you’re not bashing your way through hordes of zombies, you’re — literally — wading through the murky tension of New Orleans for buried treasure.
There’s no doubt that it’s a LISS activity. That said, how do you make The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners even better for burning calories and building muscle inside of?
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners Fitness Guide
Rely on Melee Weapons
Melee weapons are some of the most versatile in the game. You can grab a cleaver or knife out of your holster to make quick work of any zombies and hostile humans you run into. The more often you swing and thrust your melee weapons, the more calories you burn and the more work you get out of your triceps. You don’t need to worry about collecting ammo for your melee weapons, but you do need to worry about durability. Replace these often at the Gear crafting station in your camp.
Crouch Physically
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners lacked an option to toggle physical crouching when it was first released. Over the time since then, developer Skydance Interactive has patched in a physical crouching system by default. Now you can crouch, squat, or crawl around your living room floor however you prefer. This is absolutely the best way to burn calories over the alternative, where you simply press a button to toggle crouch.
Use Weighted Gear
Ah yes, like a record on repeat, we recommend weighted gear to you once more. Seeing as The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners grounds you at a slow running pace, and considering how your actions are hampered by a stamina system, you’re afforded a nice steady pace with which to pantomime your character’s movements with a weighted vest, ankle weights, and/or wrist weights on. This is perfect because weighted gear weighs you down and makes you less flexible anyhow.
You can use weighted gear to supplement your workouts in The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners with improved resistance for your upper and lower body and cardiovascular system.
As in games like No Man’s Sky, you’ll be waving your arms around quite a bit when playing The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, even if you’re just crafting or moving items around in your inventory. Weighted gear can help you burn calories passively while you aren’t doing much of anything beyond those simple movements. No matter what you’re doing, any kind of additional weight creates resistance on your body, forcing your cardiovascular system to work even harder to accomplish the same thing.
You want to be extremely careful about how you select your weighted gear, so you should refer to our guide on using weighted gear with Beat Saber, which still demonstrates the same guidelines that you’ll want to follow when you play most other VR fitness games with weighted gear on.
If you mix this tip with the others in this guide, such as running in place and using Natural Locomotion, your weighted gear will transform your zombie-killing session into a well-balanced full-body workout, at least in the LISS range of intensity.
Run in Place
Running in place is something that we generally advise readers to try out when playing games with large, open areas, like Skyrim VR or No Man’s Sky VR. Doing this in a VR game might not be everybody’s cup of tea, and it does take some added focus or extra precautions to ensure that you don’t run-in-place out of your designated play area, but over the long term, running in place is a great habit to get into while moving around in a VR game world.
It tends to add light cardio on top of the existing motion you get from simply playing the game, and it also acts as a potent inhibitor for motion sickness. This is because, when your body is bouncing up and down, your inner ear doesn’t need to work nearly as hard to acclimate to the motion that’s being shown on the screen while you move around the world of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. When your thumbs aren’t directing that motion via thumbpads or analog sticks, your brain is more likely to accept that it’s real because it matches with the motion that you’re making by running in place.
Use Natural Locomotion
Prefer to make your running in place to actually move you through the world of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners as well? This excellent Steam app is for you.
Natural Locomotion is a tool that we often give a ton of positive attention to at VR Fitness Insider because it allows you to move around a VR game world far more naturally, thus the name “Natural Locomotion”. The way it works is as such: First, you go through a simple configuration screen, and then you set Natural Locomotion up to run in the background while you play a game like The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. While it’s active, you can simply swing or pump your arms back and forth to propel your virtual self in the direction that your head is facing.
When you use Natural Locomotion to propel yourself, the simple act of running or walking in place will cause your virtual character to move forward as if you were pantomiming their steps, making this a way more efficient and ‘natural’ style of movement in VR that also passively burns calories and makes your casual gaming session into much more of a low-intensity cardio session. We’ve found that the more physically engaged you are when playing a VR game, the more immersive and enjoyable it is, meaning that using Natural Locomotion is likely to provide a more compelling VR experience overall.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is out now on SteamVR and Oculus Rift. You can grab it today for $40 MSRP. A PSVR port is expected to release sometime in Spring 2020, and a Quest port is expected to release later in the year.