After the comic books we were left wanting more from The Walking Dead, so they brought us the series.
But we still wanted more, and so they gave us The Walking Dead downloadable game. But how does it compare?
First off, the controls, the key to knowing whether you’ll like a game or not are in the 1st few clicks, and with this game it starts with you questioning, “Really? Point and click? Whaaatttt…?” But within a few tense moments you drawn in. The innovative controls bring something entirely new to the zombie genre of gaming but are so responsive you’d think controls were always this way. In conversation each response is mapped to a different button and you have mere seconds to figure out how you want to respond – and there is no hint of which is good/bad or completely wrong like some games at the moment. When in combat point and click transforms to action sequence, sure it’s only button bashing right? Wrong! It is so quick and so tense you find yourself more scared and more immersed than if you’d been sat there bashing the shoot button.
By far a mighty 9/10 – the only draw back being you can find yourself having to look around a bit for items OR click to soon on the item you need and miss all the filler. But overall – epic new controls.
Second up is sound. Now, finally, a game that doesn’t need epic scores to get across the tension. Instead the background music is subtle, tense and emotional – all adding to that clever Walking Dead tension. Instead of changing the music all the time the volume and speed of the music vary depending on who you’re with, what you’re doing etc. As for the zombies, well, no stock sounds here. Nope, you only have to glance at the credits to see the massive amount of voice actors that did specific zombie sounds, each one actually sounds individual rather than the same zombie with a different face. As for zombie slaying, let’s just call them ‘realistic’ noises, how you imagine slaying a zombie would sound? Yeah, that’s the sound. The voice actors in this game are amazing, it’s all so believable and you find yourself completely immersed by the characters – there’s not much worse than unconvincing voice actors.
An undeniable 10/10 here. No complaints at all.
Next up, graphics, again offering something different. The game offers cell shaded, comic book style graphics but in 3D with pretty good facial and body recognition with perfect sync between sound and face/body movement. But the background on the other hand lefts more to be desired, instead of keeping up with the foreground it looks almost like it hasn’t been rendered fully. However, everything interactable is of a great standard and very stylised. The animation itself is great, and from conversations to fighting zombies is seamless.
Overall an awesome 9/10 – losing a point for the background graphics, however this gets less noticeable the more you play as you get more involved, the parts that matter are epicly designed and animated.
As for the difficulty of the game there are 2 choices; Standard and Minimal. Standard shows interactable objects and gives you your objectives, as well as letting you know when you’ve made a decision that will later impact the story – Minimal, well, doesn’t. I played Episode 1 on Standard and can say it was difficult, not in a you die way but in the sense that there’s a lot of time pressure and it is open to human error and decisions – it’s fairly easy to make a simple mistake. The combat mode is challenging but appropriately, it takes concentration rather than just button bashing and the time pressure is particularly tense. On the other hand out of combat the environment is easy to navigate and interact with. It’s also a tough game in the sense that it’s all personal and down to you, your game may be completely different to mine. You don’t know what impact your decision will have, or whether what you said was the right thing to say, there’s no prejudging, a lot of the game is completely unpredictable and manipulated by you – your decision may impact whether you’re stood up or sat down and then that changes what’s to hand in the environment etc.
A fantastic 10/10.
Finally the story itself. It’s, in my humble opinion, a massively immersive story and probably one of my favourite game stories to date. You’re given trickles of information about your character through other characters and your responses to questions, so it’s dependent on your decisions to how much you’ll find out or what you’ll find out. The way the characters react to you is upto you, you can be busy making friends with everyone (my personal choice) or just get on surviving.
A definite 10/10
In a Nutshell
Strengths
The story. Immersive. Intense. Engaging. You are the character.
Interactivity. New form of combat. The immense pressure is amazing.
Ambiguity. You NEED to know more of the story and your character.
Decisions – It’s all down to you, really makes you think. Great if you’ve planned out your own zombie apocalypse plan.
Price – for £3.99 per episode or £16 for a season pass (Incl. Free episode) Epic compared to £40 games.
Teaser – at end of episode snippets of Ep 2 mean you have to buy it.
Weaknesses
Having to wait for the next episode?!?!
A lot of loading because it’s a downloadable game.
Not fully roamable – lots of scenes but they’re pretty small. Done in scenes.
OVERALL 10/10
BUY IT!!
