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The Walking Dead Onslaught
Fight your fears head-on in The Walking Dead Onslaught, the official VR game of AMC's The Walking Dead. Experience an all-new exclusive TWD story, defend yourself with real-motion melee and ranged combat, and confront both the horrors and humanity of the apocalypse.
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The Walking Dead Onslaught Reviews
Professional reviews from gaming critics
With a well-written story, fantastic world building, and great, bloody combat, The Walking Dead Onslaught is a fantastic companion piece to the beloved AMC show and a great VR game in its own right. Supply runs provide a perfect mix of speedy action and tense combat, while the narrative portions feel carefully and artfully constructed. While the VR-level budget peaks through on occasion, this is an amazingly well-made and entertaining game.
Having to deal with the zombie horde in The Walking Dead: Onslaught's Scavenger missions adds a lot to the experience, as it forces players to make tough decisions. For example, they may hear the radio static that indicates a high-tier loot chest is nearby, and will realize that it's upstairs in whatever building they're looting. But the horde is right behind them, and so they have to decide if the reward is worth the risk. This also keeps players from fully exploring the Scavenger mission areas on their first run, which does somewhat alleviate the pacing issues that plague the game later on, ...
A sturdy and satisfying combat system is let down by a narrative that feels like it's barely trying - though crushing a zombies skull is a must-have experience for VR newbies.
The Walking Dead: Onslaught has all the trappings of a pretty good hack’n’slash zombie game, but it’s not quite up to par in terms of interesting VR interactions and its flavorless story mode clocks in at a measly five hours. It’s great to see performances from Norman Reedus and the rest from this perspective, but its use of the popular TV show characters and environments is lacking because it never goes anywhere or shows us anything we haven’t already seen. That makes it much harder to recommend for anything other than fan service alone.
It’s really hard not to, and I always hate doing this, but Onslaught really feels like it’d have been a better-received game had Saints & Sinners not come out earlier this year and beat it to the punch on literally every mechanic it’s trying to do. The story is more engaging, the VR elements more immersive, the combat feels super satisfying with some impressive dismemberment, and the run-based survival/crafting loop is better realized. Onslaught on the other hand feels like a testing bed for the things Saints & Sinners succeeded on… back in January.
Like most developers in the virtual trenches, Survios deserves more credit for its efforts than it receives, and Onslaught will probably go down as another example of this.Virtual reality has become The Wild West of the video game landscape (with one notable exception) - almost [...]
Fight your fears head-on in The Walking Dead Onslaught as you assume the roles of their favorite survivors from the TV series, struggling against the relentless walker threat while confronting both the horrors and humanity of this apocalyptic world.
Ultimately, The Walking Dead: Onslaught feels like a VR version of The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, 2013’s mediocre first person shooter, also a Daryl-centric experience. There’s fun to be had if you experience it in small bites, but it’s so grind-heavy, repetitive and limited in scope that even if you’re a die-hard fan of the show, it’s barely worth sinking your teeth into.
Saints and Sinners showed there was huge potential for this series in VR, which is why it's such a shame that The Walking Dead: Onslaught is a massive disappointment.
Given the quality of other zombie games such as Saints and Sinners and Arizona Sunshine it’s really difficult to recommend Onslaught to anyone other than hardcore The Walking Dead fans. The best parts of The Walking Dead almost always revolve around the human interactions, but the game is a grind, the story is utterly disposable and it no longer feels relevant to a TV show that is now a couple seasons ahead.
This is going to be a review of The Walking Dead Onslaught, I promise. First, I want to talk about the property itself. The Walking Dead, as a gaming property, is incredibly strange. If I was to think of the perfect TWD game, a few pop to mind depending on your goals. If you want pure action, games like Left 4 Dead and World War Z have truly succeeded in capturing the massacring of zombies. Thinking about survival, it's hard to look further than State of Decay or Project Zomboid. Other games like Dying Light and Days Gone have something to offer.
Licensed games typically don’t have the best track record with providing quality content. However, some may surprise you like The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, or they can be an over the top dumpster fire that ends up being endearing in a way like Fast & Furious Crossroads. Does The Walking Dead Onslaught fit into either of these categories? Grab your crossbows and gruff biker voices and let’s take a look.