I never write "reviews" of games on here...it always just seemed pretentious to me to see a big block of text about a game when you aren't an actual reviewer. That being said, the frustration I have with this game DRIVES me to toss off that notion and type furiously...
It’s been my experience that you can tell the quality of a game based just on the title card/main menu. If you were to judge THIS game based on that, you would begin the game thinking it were designed back high schoolers using mid 90’s technology. From a design standpoint, its an utterly generic, unashamedly pixelated and blocky mess…imagine taking a 1995 computer game and popping it onto my 55 inch HD TV. And that’s just the Main Menu. The game’s actual graphics are only slightly better (though all in game menus and HUD graphics retain the eye abortion that is the main menu’s quality). Seriously, there’s no excuse for this level of crap – my PHONE has better gaming graphics. But whatever, I figure I played games with similar or worse graphics all through the 90s, I can let it go here…
The game starts EXTREMELY awkwardly. Seriously, I thought there was a bug and I somehow missed the first 5-10 minutes of the game. There is no build up, or story, period, to get your baring in the game – the developers seem to expect that your knowledge that this takes place before season 1 should be enough. Unfortunately, this makes a certain “twist”, as well as the overall story lose all potential of ANY impact/drama.
Combat – there really isn’t much to it. This isn’t really designed to be a first person “shooter”, or at least that’s what I tell myself to feel better. Fighting zombies with melee weapons is a joke – you can do a stealth kill, you can shove the zombie away from you, or you can do a quick/”power” attack. That’s it. Each face-to-face encounter with a zombie and melee weapon literally amounts to the zombie standing motionless in front of you as you hit it in the head until it falls over. You get a couple different guns (pistol, rifle, shotgun), but the game punishes you pretty hard for using them – the gunshot always attracts zombies, even after you’ve cleared the area, not to mention they’re clunky as all hell to use. I haven’t gotten Daryl’s crossbow yet, which is surprising.
Level design – they’re small and generic. The dev’s tried to give you a sense of adventure and exploration, but the levels are just too small to give you that chance. There really isn’t any variety whatsoever, you see the same door over and over, the same abandoned cars, the same soda can on the ground. Each level is also the same, game play wise – you enter an area in search of x (gas, food, etc). In doing so, you’ll come across a few survivors who will ask you to find their buddy or some supplies. Pretty simple stuff.
The game tries to do some interesting things, but falls flat. The survivor system is cool in theory, but doesn’t really amount to much: at the end of each level, you have the choice to allow any survivor you came across to come with you. Unfortunately, you can only fit so many in your vehicle, so you gotta figure out who you leave behind, based on their stats and your play style. At the start of each level, you can send them off on fetch quests. It’s not an original idea, and could have been implemented better (the moral quandary of having to leave survivors behind is never brought up).
There’s also a quicktime feature that would be pretty cool if the game looked/responded better – a zombie can grab you, which starts a mini-game where you have to struggle to aim and land a blow to their head before they kill you. This is how I die a lot – not because it’s difficult, but because if there’s 3 or more zombies, they all grab you one after the other – there’s no chance of escaping. It’s pretty much a death cinematic you are forced to play through.
I appreciate the focus on stealth, and admittedly, there are certain sections where I actually felt kind of tense, but that tension becomes frustration due to the terrible lack of save points – there are none aside from the start of a level, so if you stop playing for the day and come back the following day – all the work you may have done in a level will have to be done AGAIN because you quit before completing it. There’s no excuse for that. If you die, you get dumped back to the beginning of the level as well.
The game is a massive disappointment, but I think if you go in knowing that, you might find some amount of enjoyment for a little while. Again, it has some creative ideas, but like with that Main Menu, it’s all a generic, blocky mess. It's a total shame because it's a FPS zombie game with Daryl Friggun Dixon. There's no way this should have been as bad as it is. I say avoid it unless it's free. 2/10.
