by Kroze Kresky, Media Editor
Zombie video games are a dime a dozen these days; you can’t shoot a bullet without hitting one even within your favorite franchises. Call of Duty? Zombies! Red Dead Redemption? Also zombies! Halo? Well… to be fair Halo had zombies since Day 1 with the whole Flood infection thing but still, my point still stands. Recently the market has been flooded with zombie games ever since the success of Valve’s Left 4 Dead series and Capcom’s Dead Rising. Zombie games are never going away, so with that said, it’s time to get ready for another zombie adventure, as The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct comes home to Xbox 360!
For years people have wanted to enter Robert Kirkman’s intricately designed world within a game context. Last year, people finally got their chance with the critically acclaimed game The Walking Dead from Telltale Games. Unlike most other zombie games on the market these days, they approached it from an old school, story based adventure game format with a choose your own adventure style flow. It worked and knocked it out of the park. Instead of focusing on an action, shoot -em-up style quick cash in title, the game focused heavily on character development and interaction. Which anyone who is a huge fan of the comics or the show knows that is one of the big selling points of the license. Now that was more of a comic book Walking Dead game, what happens when we get an actual show based game for The Walking Dead that deals with some of the untold back stories of several of our favorite survivors? Activision and Terminal Reality try to answer that question with The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct.
Survival Instinct revolves around what some would consider the most fan loved characters to the television show: Daryl Dixon and his brother Merle on their quest to survive out in the zombie infested back road trails across America. Along the way they pick up many different survivors to add to their rag tag group of companions just trying to make it through each day in one piece. The game is played from a first person shooter perspective where you visit various towns and scavenge ruins, all the while fighting off zombies that you come across. In an attempt to keep the game from being too generic, Terminal Realty has added reasons for you to build and develop your crew. They can go off and help do various other tasks while you are off doing whatever mindless pointless task you are up to. By the end of the mission, if you are lucky, they will be successful in finding more supplies to help you continue on your way.
Your main goal is to keep finding more cans of gas so that you can keep driving across the country towards your next story scene. Your car will randomly stop at various towns to gather more supplies. Kinda like a zombie filled version of Oregon Trail… if it was horrible.
Yes, the game play is pretty bad overall. Its generic shoot-em-up segments with no real goal or feeling of being rewarded for playing. Its boring and too overly simplistic to make the game engaging at all. But Kroze you say, The Walking Dead is never about action, but always about the character development and the story behind it all. The problem there is this game gives you no real reason to care about any of its random characters that you pick up along the way or even our main “heroes,” the Dixons. Everyone is a cookie cutter representation of a standard zombie apocalypse survivor. This game gives none of the care or development to any single one of its characters in the same way that the comic and television series it shares its name with. Every cut-scene will have you rolling your eyes out of sheer boredom as you realize the plot (what little there is of one) goes absolutely nowhere.
On top of all this, the graphics in this game are what people would expect from a quick budget title or launch game. Not a end of the generation full priced release. the ground and wall textures are horrible. The character models are a mixed bag with not a lot of cohesiveness to them. Even Daryl and Merle look like someone punched them one too many times (though to be fair, in Merle’s case is most likely true). There is one area where the game did decide to put some money into though, the voice acting. Both Norman Reedus and Michael Rooker reprise their roles as the Dixon brothers throughout this adventure which does help to keep the believability that you are playing events leading up to the television show…
Ah yes, leading up to the series… you can tell they went into this game wanting to give the full backstory about how Merle and Daryl ended up with the group of survivors which we see at the start of the series. Unfortunately like most of the elements in this game, they completely half ass it. The game just ENDS. Cliffhanger style… no real resolution to anything that happens within the game and nor does it lead right into the series. This is a complete slap in the face to most people who buy a full priced release.
This game was clearly meant to be a quick, cheap tie-in title that was rushed through development in order to get it out before the current season of the show ended. No matter how big a fan of The Walking Dead you might be, I would highly recommend that you avoid this game as if it were a zombie items (shooting it a few times with a gun or wacking it with a crowbar also might help). This is not the game such a grand series deserves, and it only serves to be a complete insult to both gamers and fans of the series alike. Thankfully we have The Walking Dead: Season 2 coming up later this year from Telltale Games to dull the pain from this obviously undead-on-arrival release.
ComicsOnline gives The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct on XBOX 360 – 2 pieces of a good zombie game out of 5.
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