BlueMaxima is a pretty prolific guy — he’s written a fair few Reader Reviews, and I’ve enjoyed all of them. Today he’s looking at The Walking Dead, the game you totally can’t play on console, but can on Steam for some reason!
Take it away BlueMaxima!
The Walking Dead: A New Day
Telltale have been on a downwards ramp lately. With the average Puzzle Agent 2 and the godawful Jurassic Park, I was worried that they were losing their touch. But now with a new adventure based on The Walking Dead, can Telltale bring themselves back to the top of their game or will mediocrity strike again?
Loved
Graphical Style: With a graphical style that reminds me of Borderlands more than anything else, The Walking Dead is presented with a comic-like cel shaded visual style. The game looks much closer to its visual novel brethren and is a pleasure to look at.
Maturity: This isn’t a kid’s game, and it’s not much like Jurassic Park either. There’s blood, gore, violence, death and swearing, but not so much as to become redundant or worse, boring. It always feels relevant, required and in-place with where it’s dropped in, and for a piece of media (let alone a game) about zombies that’s incredibly impressive.
Story: With loveable characters with deep backstories, top-notch voice actors, a constantly moving forward storyline and a few cameos by known characters, The Walking Dead’s story manages to keep you engaged throughout the entire few hours you spend playing it, and makes you want to keep going. That’s how it really should be with the first episode of an episodic game.
Replayability: On top of the great story you’re given several choices to make throughout the game (and sometimes they can be really hard choices to make). With the promises that the choices you make will reflect on later games (and this one too) you can definitely come back more than once to see where other choices might end up.
Hated
Controls: The Walking Dead, despite being a point and click game, doesn’t actually play that well on your typical keyboard and mouse setup, being generally slow and clunky, and sometimes difficult to actually select what choice you want quickly enough. You can plug in a gamepad and use it, Xbox style, and the game actually handles better with it. Think about that for a second. A point and click game… that works better on a controller. A CONTROLLER.
It seems Telltale has managed to dig itself out of its grave, with The Walking Dead being engaging and entertaining on all levels (except do something about those controls lads) and I honestly look forward to the next episode. For a good example of how adventure games should be done today, or if you’re a fan of good storytelling/The Walking Dead in general, be sure to pick this one up. The next episode comes out soon!
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