Previously on AMC’s the Walking Dead…

Telltale Games’ recent offering based on the Walking Dead comic book series by Robert Kirkman was a tense, emotional and utterly absorbing take on the genre, and went on to scoop a plethora of awards including a BAFTA Gaming Award for ‘Best Story’.

Adopting an innovative approach that allowed the player to influence how the storyline progressed through the decisions they made (and while still managing to get the player’s pulse quickening in spite of a distinct lack of any ‘real’ action), the game was an unmitigated success, garnering critical and commercial success across the board.

Following in the wake of this success, it’s safe to say that ‘The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct’ on Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii U had some fairly sizeable shoes to fill. However, as more and more details were slowly announced, it became clear that the pieces had been put in place to allow it to more than hold its own against its predecessor. And on paper, it’s a tremendous idea, right? I mean, who wouldn’t want to play a first-person zombie game with The Walking Dead license and the chance to play as everyone’s favourite from the TV show, crossbow-wielding Daryl Dixon (voiced by the TV show’s Norman Reedus himself)?

However, almost from the very moment the game starts – like Rick Grimes stirring from his coma all the way back in issue one – it becomes all too apparent that something is definitely not right here. The graphics, while passable enough, are definitely a step down from most other shooters on the market at the moment, and while the washed-out, bleak environments work well on TV, they definitely become more than a little, well, dull when you find yourself trudging endlessly through the computer game version.

Also from the beginning, it’s readily apparently that while the predecessor was a slickly scripted, dynamic experience, this clearly… isn’t.  In fact, the plot of the entire game seems to be “let’s go to Atlanta, there’s zombies everywhere”.  And that’s basically it.  You drive a bit, kill some zombies, maybe collect an item to recruit a survivor, then drive off to the next place.  Then lather, rinse and repeat until eventually the idea of being turned into a walker doesn’t actually sound all that bad compared to suffering through one more repetitive ‘mission’.  Potentially exciting ideas are also woefully mis-handled, such as running out of fuel or your vehicle breaking down (which basically transports to you to a tiny level where you have to kill a bunch of walkers to pick up convenient cans of gasoline/car parts).  It’s baffling how such an exciting show/premise could be converted into such a bland, unengaging experience, but developers Terminal  Reality seem to have managed it effortlessly.  Kudos, I guess?

The zombi… sorry, walker AI is also inexplicably bad.  The cover to the game informs us that they can locate you by both sight and smell – which is a decent enough assumption to make – but these senses are applied almost at random, leaving certain walkers completely oblivious to you when you’re standing just twenty feet away, while others come charging at you out of the undergrowth from hundreds of yards in the distance. Sadly, in this case, it also seems like the ‘sense of smell’ claim is actually just an excuse to explain away some of the erratic behavior of the walkers, and fails to serve any purpose other than to confuse and annoy.

Have no fear though, as when a walker does finally notice you, you can attempt to swat them down using the clunky, awkward hand-to-hand combat. Trying to juggle the walker by alternating between pushing them away and hacking/smashing them with whatever you have in your hands is an enjoyable enough mechanic for the first few walkers, but rapidly loses its luster after the three hundredth. And curiously, it quickly becomes apparent that it’s actually easier in some cases (and particularly with larger crowds of walkers) to actually let one grab you and then use the ‘quick time’-esque event to dispatch them with one shot, before chaining this ‘grapple game’ to the surrounding walkers. I mean, surely it can’t be the developers intention that when players are faced with a large crowd of walkers, their initial instinct is to charge in towards them and start grappling their way to freedom? It makes absolutely no sense.

A wide variety of firearms are also provided, but – as in the TV show and comic book – any use of firearms usually results in being swarmed by an endless surge of walkers, so they’re rendered effectively useless in all but the direst of circumstances.  So in essence, what we’re left with is a first person shooter without any shooting, a game that’s clearly intended to see you creeping through the shadows and ducking behind objects to avoid detection, before picking the walkers off one at a time.  However, for reasons mentioned above, that becomes wholly unnecessary, leaving me scratching my head at just how the developers intended for this game to be played.

The levels are uninspired, repetitive, and quickly blur together into a haze of ‘meh’.  Oh, a  dark farmhouse. Oh, a dark factory. Oh, a dark police station. Zzzzzz. For a game that should be a gripping, tense experience, it ends up as a joyless slog through some extremely bland gameplay.  Recruiting survivors, which should in itself be one of the highlights, is reduced to “find this item and I’ll join you”, and there’s absolutely zero emotional investment with them once they join your group.  In fact, sending them out to scavenge for supplies – and risk an untimely death – while you complete the current level becomes almost a chore.  Live or die, you’ll just pick up another one by finding some batteries (or something) in the next level.  It’s yet another puzzling gameplay choice that shows absolutely no understanding of what made the comics and TV show so successful – namely, the emotional investment that the viewer/reader/player makes in the characters.

That said, the game isn’t all bad.  For the first few levels, the experience is pretty damn tense and enjoyable (at least until you realise how to ‘cheese’ the gameplay mechanics to trivialise the walkers completely), and it’s fairly satisfying – if ultimately unnecessary – to sneak around a walker infested area, picking them all off from behind with your patented ‘knife through the temple’.  Also, the voice acting from the stars of the TV show, Daryl and the Michael Rooker-voiced Merle is top-notch, and really lifts the title during their interactions (even if the story itself is, as I mentioned, almost nonexistent).

All in all, this is a missed opportunity of the highest order, and while it may not have been destined to reach the dizzying heights of the Telltale Games version, it should still have been able to provide an enjoyable, tense and action-packed take on The Walking Dead license.  Sadly though, this game misses the mark by a wide margin, and I see absolutely no reason that anyone – particularly a fan of the show – would want to pick it up.

Rating: 3/10.

(Review by Ceej)