The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct

Outside of these interesting narrative nuggets, Survival Instinct sinks its infected teeth into monotony and carelessly chews away at it to deliver a repetitious experience that lets a few cool ideas go to waste. This is an apocalypse you don’t want to survive.

Squandered potential. This is what we thought of after having played The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. The lame story, unfinished gameplay, lots of bugs and errors and the stale graphics form a game we unfortunately cannot recommend at all. In contrary to Telltale Games's title based on the graphic novel, this is a waste of a formerly promising license.

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is based on a good idea - we'd love a good TWD survival game -, but with a very poor execution.

Awful graphics, cumbersome controls, frustrating combats, repetitive gameplay: The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is definitely a bad game.

It’s a generic zombie story to a Z, and not helped by horrible visuals that awkwardly recycle character models and stages. Together, these elements make the game feel like a reanimated corpse.

It’s a half-baked attempt at a game that can be fun in the occasional spooky part, but ends up under-delivering in every way.

A very poor shooter-adventure game based on the famous TV series. Pick up the exceptional graphical adventure from Telltale Games instead.

With the success of Telltale Games’s arcade game, there were high hopes for this full-fledged retail title. As it happens you would be best off saving your pennies for the already announced sequel to the arcade title as Survival Instinct will leave you with bitter feelings towards The Walking Dead series. Unless you are an absolute nutter for anything to do with The Walking Dead, your money will be best spent elsewhere.

You'd better follow your instinct when it comes to this Walking Dead-game. Survival Instinct a rushed and unpolished game. That this shambling corpse actually contains a few good ideas is not a good enough reason to endure the brain-rotting gameplay. The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct shouldn't have risen from the dead to begin with.

The premise of the game is not terrible, but there needed to be more intelligence and purpose in the application to elevate it above the mundanity of clubbing endless zombies to death. If only someone could make a really good Walking Dead game. Oh, wait...

The whole thing is just so dull and tedious that it captures all the worst qualities of a road trip, but none of the exciting ones.

It's as if the developer simply ceased to care, or ran out of time, or both. Who knows? What we do know is that Terminal Velocity has crafted something truly loathsome and undeserving of its heritage. [Issue#135, p.108]

Archaic design spoils good ideas in this shoddy squandering of one of the hottest licenses going. [June 2013, p.74]

Basically, it's broken. [Issue#97, p.73]

An interesting concept that's been realised into a totally horrible and dull shooter/stealth action crossover that I cannot recommend to fans of the series, not even to fans of the Walking Dead comics. The only noticeable positive about it is its voice acting.

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is terrible. It’s a waste of a licence and should be the poster child for a rushed, shameless cash grab. That is all you need to know.

Once you've stabbed one, run past one, and been killed by one, you've played enough. And that two minute process is not worth any amount of money.

The tide has begun to turn for licensed games thanks to great efforts like those from Telltale, Rocksteady's Batman franchise and others. The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is the exact sort of lazy, cheap cash-grab that gave licensed games a bad name in the first place. To put a slightly less nostalgic twist on an old cliche: They don't make 'em like this anymore.

Survival Instinct is a major disappointment with its brainless story and buggy, repetitive and lazy gameplay. This game provides neither chills, thrills or challenges for the player. Do yourself a favor and stay as far away from this cash grab as possible. What a terrible waste of a license.

Survival Instinct is an outright slap to the face of the entertaining comics and TV series based on The Walking Dead. This is so far the worst game of 2013 and no one should ever consider playing this.

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is an abomination on every level: a dull, cynical and irreparably flawed mess which is as mindless and soulless as its antagonists.

An abomination of a game that does justice to neither the TV series nor the comic. AMC and Activision should be really careful next time.

The idea behind Survival Instinct seems temping enough, but the final product is a disappointment in every possible way. This is simply put a licensed game at its worst. If you're faced between being eaten by a zombie and playing this game, choose the first option.

There are videogames, great licensed products and then there is The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. Coming out with the end of the third season of the series, Activision's game is just a tasteless merchandising product, quickly developed in an attempt to increase the financial income of the license. Everything is to be thrown away in this pitiful FPS that clearly shows the misunderstanding of the series by the development team. What's left is a very ugly game which is quite appalling for HD consoles nearing the end of their lives. Very repetitive, with no interest whatsoever, the game offers one of the worst AI's in the industry. Needless to say that after Telltales's brilliant games the quality drop is epic, and when a game's quality falls of the table, so does our grade.

It's hard to accept that such a title can exist in 2013. It's probably the best candidate for worst game of the year.

A TV tie-in of such depressingly low quality you’d think it was the ‘90s once again, especially when you see the terrible graphics and artificial intelligence.

Survival Instinct clearly isn't finished, and has no business expecting money from any paying customer. It's the kind of hurried, jury-rigged game that risks dealing damage to a property -- an especially sour note considering all the excellent work achieved by Telltale's The Walking Dead.

Though a functional game at the most basic level, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is an absolute disaster from start to finish. It feels like Terminal Reality duct-taped several different half-finished projects together and assumed the brand tie-in would move units. It’s an absolute disgrace—both to the TV show it’s based on and videogames as a whole.