The War Z has quickly become the week's most interesting, and hilarious, news item. Between the bad press, the worse press and the fact the game's been taken down from Steam, most of you are probably yet to actually play it.

Well, over the past few days, I've been playing it. So you don't have to.

Seriously, don't take this as an Official Kotaku Review™, but... from what I've played, the game is awful. Animations are janky. There's a distinct lack of user prompts or directions. Some textures look like they're from a 1990s flight simulator. The zombie AI is comedic.

Pretty much all of which you'll get a sense for in the above video, which for reference is all from a single playthrough. One of the few I've managed without being instantly killed by a human player.

Sure, the game can change. It can improve. After all, it's still in testing a "foundation release". Question is, after all this mess, whether anyone trusts the developers that it will, or if they do, if anyone will care.

UPDATE - Bummer, seems there's some compression problems with the vid when uploading. I've swapped in a YouTube version that's a little better. Apologies (though you'll still obviously get the gist).

As promised, the strange saga of War Z just keeps getting stranger. Turns out this promo screen for zombie survival game, which was pulled from Steam earlier today, was plagiarized from The Walking Dead.

A Kotaku reader sent over the following image to show off just how much of this War Z title screen was plagiarized from other sources: (Click to expand.)

It looks like the top few photos are from fan zombie gatherings (assuming they're not from actual zombie invasions). We couldn't track down the bottom-left photo—I think it's from Shaun of the Dead?—but the bottom-middle one is straight out of The Walking Dead.

The bottom-right photo, which was mirrored for the leftmost female zombie in the War Z image, is also from The Walking Dead.

For a clearer comparison:

Will this story ever end? Stay tuned.

Controversial zombie survival game The War Z has been removed from Steam.

Although there's still a listing for the game on Valve's digital distribution service, you can no longer buy it.

Fans have been clamoring for the game's removal from Steam since it was released on Monday. Many gamers have criticized the game for its misleading description, controversial microtransactions, and forum censorship. For more on the War Z debacle, check out our full roundup.

Update: In response to Kotaku's request for comment, Valve issued the following statement:

From time to time a mistake can be made and one was made by prematurely issuing a copy of War Z for sale via Steam. We apologize for this and have temporary removed the sale offering of the title until we have time to work with the developer and have confidence in a new build. Those who purchase the game and wish to continue playing it via Steam may do so. Those who purchased the title via Steam and are unhappy with what they received may seek a refund by creating a ticket at our support site here.

Update 2: In response to Kotaku's request for comment, War Z boss Sergey Titov also sent over a statement:

We're making sure that our Store page is 100% correct this is why.

Bottom line – our end goal is to have satisfied and not angry customers, so this is more important for us than everything else.

This week's wildest story is the story of The War Z, a new Steam game that has caused a great deal of controversy for numerous reasons.

Update: This afternoon, The War Z was pulled from Steam.

Fans have come out criticizing the zombie survival game for misleading advertising, suspicious microtransactions, and forum censorship. Meanwhile, The War Z's developers have defended themselves, telling us that "93% of [their] customers like the game."

It's a bizarre mess that we've been following closely and will continue to follow as this week goes on. Here's everything we know about The War Z so far.

Controversy led the developers to change the game's Steam description.

Following yesterday's controversy—during which a giant thread on Reddit alleged that War Z's Steam description was full of lies—the people at War Z developer Hammerpoint Interactive have changed the game's Steam description to be more accurate. Hammerpoint no longer claims that the game has player skills, maps sized up to 400km, or private servers. (Private servers, the description now says, will be available "soon.")

Hammerpoint boss Sergey Titov also issued something of an apology to fans, saying that he was sorry they misread the description.

War Z looks a hell of a lot like Day Z.

The comparisons are impossible to avoid: from the name to the subject matter, it's easy to see War Z as a ripoff that sets out to cash in on Day Z's popularity. But while Day Z, a massively successful zombie survival mod for Arma II, is completely free, War Z costs $15 on Steam—and thanks to some newly-installed microtransactions, it could cost you even more.

In an e-mail to me, Titov addressed this controversy. (Spelling and grammar have not been altered.)

"As soon as we've announced game – we've received our share of hate from some of the DayZ fans accusing us of just ripping off DayZ concept to make a quick money," Titov wrote. "While over time, especially after game have been launched publicly players been able to see that those two designs are pretty different, there're still DayZ fanboys out there who just can't accept fact that similar concept doesn't mean being copycat... Interesting fact – only around 30% of our player base we have right now actually played DayZ. And 15% of our players never heard of DayZ before they started playing The War Z. This confirms that we've been able to attract new players to the survival/zombie war genre of the game."

Lots of people have been banned from War Z, both during the beta and the current release.

"Not too long ago, Hammerpoint banned roughly three thousand players, without providing any proof whatsoever, and blatantly lying about their anti cheat system being flawless," one Kotaku reader told me in an e-mail yesterday. "Today, they went back on their word, saying that a small amount of the bans were not legit, but still leaving a ton of people [banned], and almost 96 hours in queue from their support without any answers at all."

Several other War Z players have also e-mailed me over the past few days to complain about bans. A different player said he was banned a few days ago, then unbanned last night along with hundreds of others. "I've never hacked, or purposely used exploits that were in the game," he said. "They unbanned hundreds of players three days after the fact without saying a word between the events. They have been lying to the public non-stop."

Titov also addressed this during our conversation, telling me via e-mail that he thinks a lot of War Z players are lying. (Again, spelling/grammar are unaltered.)

"We also are pretty aggressive banning people who use cheats and hacks in a game," Titov wrote. "Those guys normally have paid $10-20 to purchase hacks that offered them'no hack detection guarantee' – naturally they're being extremely pissed off when we've detected their hacking activities and banned their accounts. Those guys are very active in spreading false information and lies about game."

You're not allowed to make posts on War Z's Steam message board about why you quit.

The rules, as laid out by a moderator who goes by the handle Kewk, are a little intense:

Some crafty players have found ways to circumvent this.

Check out this message, screencapped by a NeoGAFfer.

(Stumped? Try reading it vertically.)

A Valve moderator is investigating claims that people have been wrongly banned from The War Z's message board.

As the moderator writes:

Several users have raised concerns about censorship or other posters being banned unfairly. We take these complaints seriously and are investigating the issue.

If you have specific examples of what you feel was unfair or incorrect moderation on this forum, please post them in this thread (or on my profile) and we'll have a look. There has been a lot of traffic in this forum - a new topic every minute for the last day and a half, with thousands of replies. All that makes moderation a very difficult task.

Thousands of people are signing petitions to protest The War Z.

Some of them want full refunds for the game.

Others demand that Valve take the game off Steam.

(I've reached out to Valve to ask if they plan on doing anything about The War Z, and will update should they respond.)

The man behind The War Z helped make one of the worst games of all time.

It's called Big Rigs, and it was immortalized by Alex Navarro in this entertaining GameSpot video review. Sergey Titov was the lead programmer on Big Rigs, according to a number of write-ups on the game.

Titov most recently worked on League of Legends at Riot Games, which makes it interesting that...

At one point, the War Z's terms of service linked to League of Legends.

Although the TOS has since been changed, several months ago, it linked out to League of Legends, which seems to imply that at one point, parts of War Z's terms of service were ripped from Riot's online game.

One Kotaku reader sent in this screengrab:

The Terms of Service come with one rather interesting line.

ONCE YOU AGREE TO THIS TERMS OF SERVICE AND THE END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR THE GAME (THE "EULA") AND SERVICE FOR THE GAME COMMENCES, YOU WILL NO LONGER BE ELIGIBLE FOR A REFUND FOR ANY AMOUNTS OR OTHER CONSIDERATION PAID BY YOU FOR THE USE (OR FUTURE USE) OF THE GAME CLIENT OR THE SERVICE.

Expect to see more and more strange things as time goes on.

The War Z mess has been rather crazy. Quite a few people seem to be unhappy with the game, and a number of readers have contacted us with strange details and stories about their experiences with it. We will of course continue to follow this story and keep you updated as more details come out about this strange situation.

UPDATE: More craziness!

Here's a post on The War Z's forums from Titov asking people to vote for the game on Metacritic, where it currently has a user score of 1.5/10.

And here's an article from PCGamesN, who measured The War Z's first map, Colorado. On the Steam description for The War Z, the developers say that Colorado is 100 square kilometers. PCGamesN's Steve Hogarty determined that the map is actually... 9.7417 square kilometers.

The roll out of zombie shooter The War Z is one hot mess. Yesterday, gamers on Reddit were pissed about the game's misleading description on Steam. And now, the game's maker, Hammerpoint Interactive, is saying it wasn't the description's fault. Oh, no, it was yours.

"I'm sure that a few players may be upset, but I can assure you that based on what we're seeing, the number of people who post bad comments are a small percentage of people who actually bought the game," Hammerpoint Interactive's Sergey Titov told GameSpy, echoing what he also told Kotaku.

However, Titov went one step further by saying, "I'm sure there'll be people who will look into small details and will say ‘no I was mislead' where in fact they imagined something to themselves without checking details first."

"I think there's a difference between false claims and perception of the text. There's no such thing as 'fully released' for online game. As far as I'm concerned The War Z is in a stage when we're ready to stop calling it Beta. This is a basic version—bones to which we're going to add more and more 'meat'—features and content in the coming months and hopefully years."

As the Reddit screengrabs show, the text and those discrepancies don't appear imagined:

Hammerpoint can add all the meat it wants, but many gamers feel like they've gotten a false bill of sale. The outrage online has been so vociferous that the Steam description was updated:

Well, sorta.

On the game's forums, Titov issued this apology (it's his second; here's the first):

As you all know we launched the game on Steam yesterday. Okay—we're number one top grossing game on Steam right now—thank you guys for your support.

At the same time it was clear that there were a number of customers that felt that information about the game was presented in a way that could have allowed for multiple interpretations.

We've taken steps to correct this and format information presented on our Steam Store page in a way so it provides more clear information about game features that are present in the Foundation Release and what to expect in the coming weeks.

We also want to extend our apologies to all players who misread infromation [SIC] about game features.

At the end of the day our goal is to serve our players as best as we can, and we love when you guys steer us into the right way of doing it !

This bit deserves a reply: "We also want to extend our apologies to all players who misread infromation [SIC] about game features." It's not us, it's you.

On the game's forums, some are accepting the studio's apologies, thanking the developers. Others are simply not having it. DeadlySwordz writes, "So you waited till a bunch of people bought your game and made some money first before addressing this? Wow. Good thing I didn't buy and never will." Kingkilla15425 added," It wasn't a misrepresentation, it was a blatant lie. But good job fixing it anyways."

"No one misread anything," writes Snedsdawg. "The information you posted was false, it's as simple as that. Don't try to pin this on us, it was your error, not ours."

Besides launching suspicious microtransactions, Hammerpoint is directing unhappy customers to Steam for a refund. You know, those unhappy customers that supposedly misread the original Steam description and got bad infromation.

Steam purchase page issues [War Z Forums]

A Shocking Interview With The War Z Developer On False Steam Store Claims [GameSpy via MCVUK]

The pitchforks are out. Gamers are furious with the developers of The War Z, a game that seems to have made it to Steam without many of the features that developers have promised for it.

Right now, an item on the front page of Reddit that accuses The War Z's developers of "blatantly [lying] about included features" has accrued close to 2,000 comments, most of them taking issue with the game. Other gamers have taken to message boards and Steam to complain about The War Z, which was released yesterday.

One Redditor captured the game's Steam product page to point out which listed features are not actually in the game:

Many people in the Reddit thread have harsh words for The War Z. Redditor nadrewod writes (emphasis added):

Basically, WarZ is a reskin of War Inc. made to ride on the coattails of Day Z, but the dev team (Hammerpoint Interactive) has been charging people to even play the game (something DayZ doesn't do [yet: it is releasing as a standalone game at some point in the future, but for now, it is just a free ARMA II mod]), and hasn't updated much in the past few months. There have been some controversies (admins on the forums and subreddit changing/deleting posts and banning users for mentioning hot topics like the ex-moderator Devin), and the game doesn't even look that good.

Meanwhile, DayZ, a free mod (which seems to only make money from merchandise, and possibly donations), has been updating the game fairly frequently, was the first one on the market, has been highly praised across the board by many critics for its various features, has had over 1,000,000 unique players, and has been praised by the makers of ARMA II (partially because it has been driving their sales, since DayZ currently requires a copy of ARMA II to play).

Redditor Johan3043 writes:

I bought it on release and i feel so robbed, this game REALLY sucks so hard compared to DayZ. Save yourselves 15 bucks and wait for DayZ Standalone.

The War Z Team Offers A Defense

I reached out to Hammerpoint Interactive, the folks behind The War Z, to get their side of the story. In an e-mail, Hammerpoint general manager Sergey Titov told me that he sees the complainers as a vocal minority. (We've cleaned up his e-mails for grammatical errors.)

"We're constantly running surveys to ask our players what they think – how we're doing," Titov said. "As of right now over 93% of our customers like the game, with over 40% saying it's perfect and around 50% saying it's good, but they'd like to see more polishing and features. Yet, 4% don't like the game and decided not to play it, and 3% hate the game... My point is that absolute majority of our players are supporting us, yet, yes, players who don't like the game will be very vocal about it."

Titov also responded to a few specific complaints from the Reddit image:

On the game not being listed as Alpha or Beta: "Because it's not an Alpha or Beta. We've launched 'Foundation Release' for Steam on Monday (see attached press release)."

On the missing hardcore mode: "There's a hardcore mode that you can select when you launch the game, yet most of the players are not using it. Single biggest difference between Normal and Hardcore is that once you die in Hardcore, your character won't be revived and will be lost (permadeath)."

On the lack of promised private servers or skills: "We're updating our Steam page to provide more information on this, but basically both features are coming soon.

"First thing players will get is private server rentals. They'll be able to rent both public and private (password-protected) servers – both Gameworld (ie Colorado map) and Strongholds (smaller maps that basically allow them to use those servers as "home base").

"Our plan was to launch server rentals around the end of December-early January and we're still on track to do that.

"And we're testing skills right now with small select group of players. As soon as everyone is satisfied with balance and design, we'll push it public. I honestly can't give a solid timeframe for this to happen, since it largely depends on how our player community reacts on our initial version of the skill tree."

On Reddit's claim that there's only one map, and that it's 72km: "The Colorado map, our first map to be released, is over 100 square kilometers."

On the max server limit being 50 rather than the promised 100: "I don't see 'LIE' in saying 'up to 100 players per sever' and having the current limit at 50 players. We've just lowered the number of players per map down from 70 based on requests and votes from our players. Ie - we've had 70 players per server - which was what we felt was the 'comfort level' for this map, but when we asked our players about it, the majority voted for 50 slots per server. So we did exactly what our community and our players asked us for."

Gamers are never shy about voicing their opinions on what they'd like to see in a video game, but when a developer puts promises in writing that aren't delivered upon, these situations can get ugly—particularly when people are asked to spend money on a game that doesn't do what it says it will.

We'll keep you updated on this story as time goes on.