OVERKILL's The Walking Dead

Overkill’s TWD is a game meant to be played with friends. If you want to enjoy a coop experience and you like the series, it’s probably a good choice, although if you’re playing alone you would probably better off looking elsewhere.

Overkill’s The Walking Dead is a game that got better after release.

Although an improvement over The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, this new game feels unoriginal and not particularly engaging.

I enjoyed Overkill’s The Walking Dead but perhaps more as a concept. Playing with a friend makes the experience much more enjoyable; however, the price point is a concern given all the issues I had with the game. To this day, it doesn’t feel complete. Granted, it has the potential to be an AAA game but given its current state, The Walking Dead certainly feels like a budget title. Before you make the plunge (and I recommend you do strongly consider the purchasing the game), I’d recommend holding out until we see a price drop or when for it gets fine-tuned.

A gorgeous looking co-op zombie shooter that's plagued with a horde of technical issues and diseased-ridden AI, Overkill’s The Walking isn’t a terrible game but compared to more polished cooperative shooters, it just comes up short in so many ways.

A bittersweet experience feeling like it's still in beta. You may still enjoy Overkill’s The Walking Dead if you can play it with three friends.

Overkill’s The Walking Dead is deeply flawed and bland. Its gameplay feels generic, sometimes bringing out anomalous and umpleasant situations.

OVERKILL's The Walking Dead is a clever take on the series with a subtle mix of stealth and gunfights to survive the numerous foes of the lore. Sadly, the game is ruined by bugs, the lack of tutorial, the long loading times, and a lack of vocal chat and the balance problems.

Overkill's The Walking Dead is pretty, but doesn’t do anything that we haven’t seen before in a number of other post-apocalyptic first- or third-person games.

Overkill’s The Walking Dead has many flaws but most of them can be fixed. If it does so, it could turn into a good game, since there’s already some very cool cooperative moments, that fit the Walking Dead fantasy.

Overkill’s The Walking Dead it feels like a great idea poorly executed. Its action is simple and repetitive, and a lot of bugs ruin the experience.

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.

Arguably the biggest flaw with Overkill’s The Walking Dead is just how generic and bland it feels.

Overkill's The Walking Dead can be fun in a group but most of the time monotony and balancing weaknesses are frustrating.

The Walking Dead gets the zombies and the theme just right, but everything else is a mess.

Co-op zombie-splattering will never be devoid of fun, but Overkill's The Walking Dead is lacking in both the series' storytelling and technical polish.

Despite the excellent foundation on which it is based, Overkill's The Walking Dead is a mediocre production. Although it can still be saved, at present, the excessive repetitiveness and the artificial difficulty imposed by the developers make playing and progressing simply frustrating, ruining the experience.

Clearly the game gives a "unfinished" feeling. OVERKILL'S The Walking have good ideas like horde system, customisation and skills for character et post-apocalyptic atmosphere in level design. Sadly, Artificial Intelligence is catastrophic, the game is repetitive and loading times are disastrous.

Overkill's The Walking Dead brings nothing new to the genre. Visually the game looks nice, but its gameplay is too boring and predictable.

Overkill’s The Walking Dead is nothing but a random zombie shooter.

Overkill's The Walking Dead is an ambitious online multiplayer experience. It nails the aesthetic of The Walking Dead universe. However, it struggles in almost every other department. Bugs and game-halting instances have been very apparent in the near 20 hours spent with it.

Blasting through the higher difficulty levels with friends is great fun, and the initial few hours are a pleasure, but once you get into the meat of the game and its myriad of glaring issues, it quickly becomes apparent that this game is not living up to its own potential.

The best loot-driven games rely on a great progression to spur you on, to get you so excited that you don’t mind replaying the same old levels. “Overkill’s The Walking Dead” seems to expect that, once you’ve started playing and leveling up a character, you simply won’t be able to stop. There are plenty of games, even time sinks, that will treat you better.

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.

Overkill’s The Walking Dead plans to dole out content in seasons, so the current batch of missions will soon expand. But dramatic reworking of most core combat and mission systems are necessary before the game could be worthy of a recommendation. The premise sounds promising for fans of cooperative play, zombie action, and the taut survival storylines implied by the license. The execution fails to meet the needs of any of those groups. You’re better off heeding the warning – keep this menacing door closed, and leave the zombies to their gnawing hunger.

The Walking Dead license was wasted on an ugly game that plays crudely, offers little content and trails behind a decade-old Left 4 Dead. [01/2019, p.56]

OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead does a decent job of immersing players into a universe of the undead, but lacks innovation and is ultimately brought to its knees by the overwhelming amount of bugs and lack of player-friendly systems.

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.

Overkill's The Walking Dead squanders whatever little potential it had with poor presentation, unenjoyable gameplay, technical issues, and simply poor design.

OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead is a complete disaster, a game that doesn’t work from any perspective. Its narrative is terrible, its progression system is pointless and its gameplay is repetitive.

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.

From its restrictive mission structures, unbalanced difficulty and frustrating means of progression, The Walking Dead struggles to justify the time it requires from you. It's a collection gameplay blueprints stacked upon one another without thoughtful consideration on how they might cohesively work together, wrapped up in a dull presentation and mundane combat that very rarely excites. The Walking Dead is a mess of scattered ideas and a lack of direction, and there's no reason to make sense of it all.