Overkill's The Walking Dead

First impressions can often leave you feeling like it’s a slow, groggy mess with too much to manage and too many tough survivors working against you. But once you get deep enough into the game, only then does it start to feel more enjoyable, which sadly isn’t how it should be.

And really, how Walking Dead is that? The game manages to facilitate some really involving moments, even if it doesn’t necessarily provide them. It’s not consistent with it, but at its best, it’s a testament to human triumph against terrible odds and even terribler host migration. It’s about wordless communication and working together to achieve something that you’d be hopeless at alone.

OVERKILL's The Walking Dead is a fun title that is bogged down by a combination of bugs, lack of sign-posting, and confusing design decisions.

The Walking Dead is one of the most popular franchises in mainstream pop culture right now. Yet, aside from Telltale’s (mostly) excellent episodic series, we’ve yet to actually play a competent action game set in this grisly universe. Overkill Software and Starbreeze Studios are looking to change that with Overkill’s The Walking Dead, a co-operative shooter game.

My favorite part of Overkill’s The Walking Dead are the moments that build up before everything goes to hell, and they will go to hell. Just when you think you carefully navigated around a horde of Walkers, an errant gunshot or the wrong door being opened results in you and your compatriots being surrounded. Before you know it, you’ve burned through most of your ammo, teammates are downed and you’re left with a slow firing crossbow.

Bugs and bad networking make this co-op zombie shooter a shambling mess.

A game that feels like it was rushed out of development. It falls well short of potential due to lack of content, a few poor design decisions, and bugs.

As long as you’ve got a group of friends to play with, running the missions, leveling up characters, getting new gear, and cutting through swaths of zombies is fun in Overkill’s The Walking Dead. But it’s all wrapped up in a package of multiple frustrations: Technical issues, unavoidable repetition, and a general lack of direction are a serious drag on an otherwise exciting and tense zombie-filled co-op adventure. However, fans of The Walking Dead may be put off by the lack of source material respect in its story.

It channels the grit and desperation of the TV show well enough, but the prolonged development has ended in a co-op shooter that feels outdated and unexceptional.

Sometimes a game just doesn’t work out. Despite lots of time, a strong property, and capable development talent, the experience fails to solidify. In the case of Overkill’s The Walking Dead, major technical problems and connection issues, baffling gameplay systems and controls, tedious combat and stealth, and poorly structured missions all contrive to halt the fun.  A deep and rewarding upgrade and progression path hides behind the mess, but you’re unlikely to enjoy it, as the game fails to offer meaningful engagement.

Overkill’s The Walking Dead could have been something special, but it finds itself dragged down by poorly implemented and designed systems. There’s flashes of what could have been, and there’s a chance that Starbreeze will turn this game around in the coming months to rebuild from a poor launch, but as it stands I couldn’t even recommend this game to the most hardcore of The Walking Dead fans.

I really wanted to like this game, and after the beta I was hoping there would be more to it than what they were testing. Unfortunately, there’s not, and there’s absolutely no way I could recommend buying this game. If you could pick it up for £10, sure, but four times that? No way.