REVIEW – It seems that I only get such quality games to deal with recently (and I’d even bet money on RIDE 3 being the next one!). With this first sentence, I already revealed how The Walking Dead from the makers of Payday (Overkill) turned out to be on PC. However, at least it’s not as bad as 2013’s Survival Instinct was, thankfully…

Well, this game managed to get Starbreeze, the publisher of this game, to have some financial tough times, even with the console ports of The Walking Dead being pushed to early 2019 – if those will start as badly as the PC version did, which is a repetitive, boring, constantly grind-requiring, and in general, an UNNECESSARY (yes, I wrote unnecessary) game, then how much of interest will it even gather on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One?

The good

I learned to concentrate on headshots… Okay, maybe the weapon customisation is alright as well, but its existence is questionable…

The bad

This game is Payday with zombies: The Walking Dead offers four-player co-op, and, if you somehow plan to play the game solo, due to the artificial unintelligence, you will suffer, mainly due to how the game doesn’t even seem to try to somewhat balance the game towards the single player, who will have perhaps too much of a challenge in front of them. Our teammates, who will have unique skills (one of them can deal more damage on low health) maybe can help defend the base (although at the start of the matches, there doesn’t seem to be enough time), and the enemies, regardless of them being walkers or humans, are annoying and dumb. Walkers tend to hone on the closest teammate (all of which who got a decent cinematic trailer but other than that, they are all lifeless…) in a straight line, while humans can somehow find a miraculous way to hit us, even if they don’t face towards us. Sure, I could lower the difficulty from Overkill to Normal, but the emphasis on stealth would remain, and in general, I don’t think changing difficulty levels would help the game.

You have this base building in Washington D.C., but I think it isn’t well-thought-out at all. Why should I even care about these people in my base in the first place? And this lack of polish also strikes into the voice acting, too: the speech heard during the minimalistic, slideshow-ish cutscenes, sound dull and drab, and while I’m at the subject of voice, allow me to say this: there is no voice chat in the game. If even 2003’s Unreal Tournament 2004 had voice chat, why couldn’t 2018’s The Walking Dead get it?!

Sure, Overkill says that they plan to fill up the story with more content via „seasons,” but I say they shouldn’t even try – with a cooperative FPS, maybe, just maybe, they should have made the gunplay enjoyable. You get a primary, a secondary gun, and a melee weapon, but there’s just no power to the pistols, and the devs tried to limit you from using firepower by adding a noise meter with several tiers. (Even Survival Instinct is laughing from its grave – there, you could use guns as long as you could stay alive.

Sure, you got the walkers’ attention, but they weren’t unlimited!) Although you should get to complete a few missions first, it might not happen, as they are ridiculously repetitive: fight against X enemies! Find Y items! Avoid Z! All while you get no markers on where to go. Nothing! Why should the player get just a slight amount of help to grind (as without acquiring certain items, parts of the map will remain locked)? And don’t even get me started on the menu system, too: that is one of the most unintuitive, complicated UI I have ever seen.

End the ugly

Starbreeze can only sell this game in higher amounts if it’s cheap (like in Russia or China, where the prices are always reduced from North American, European pricing), but I still wouldn’t buy it. It’s a shoddy, cheap Payday bootleg with The Walking Dead painted over it. It’s below average in many aspects, and I’d even say that to the visuals, too. The game needs time, but why should I give it some? It’s complex where it should be basic, and it’s as simple as a stick when it should have complexity. Get out of here; I’ll give it a 3.5/10 with me never wishing to see it again. Time to sleep, RIDE 3 is around the corner.

-V-

Publisher: Starbreeze

Developer: Overkill

Genre: FPS

Release date: November 6, 2018