• The Walking Dead Video Game

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    The Walking Dead video game (based on the comics, rather than the show) was released in five parts, coming out between April and November 2012. A version was released in December that contained all five ‘episodes’ on one disk, which is when I bought it and why my Christmas season was spent with zombies, cannibalism and suicide.

    The Walking Dead is an adventure, point and click game and definitely not, as the nice man at the Best Buy warned me, a shooter in any way shape or form. On the few occasions you’re given a gun and told to shoot; you don’t have to worry too much about aiming, if you’re pointing in the general direction, that’s good enough. The activities your character is given are far ranging, and you never end up feeling like you’re given the same actions to perform over and over again.

    The story follows Lee Everett, a convicted killer who is being driven off to prison when the zombie outbreak strikes and the sheriff car crashes. He soon meets up with a little girl named Clementine and the two quickly form a tight bond that keeps the story together. Every major plot point, and many actions, will be judged by their effect on Clementine throughout the story, and in crafting their relationship the game does a superb job.

    The story often takes front and center stage throughout the game and there are frequent cut scenes and many points where the focus is on the characters’ interactions with each other rather than the zombie apocalypse.

    The game starts right off introducing you to the mechanics of the game, showing you the range of choice you’re given during dialog and the effect it has on the tone of the conversation, then throwing you immediately into a life and death situation where you have to fumble for the gun while a zombie slowly crawls towards you (it sounds easy enough but in the alarm of the moment I ended up having to watch Lee have a large bite taken out of his neck and was forced to restart from the beginning of the encounter).

    You’re given a lot of a dialog options throughout the game, and make many decisions throughout that effect how your companions interact and talk to you. You even have some choices to make: Who to side with; who to save; even who to feed when the food runs out.

    The game is auto saved based, and all the big choices are put on a timer, so you have to think fast, which does add a certain feeling of pressure and realism, but if you change your mind a split second later there’s usually no going back.

    The choices, the story, the characters and especially your relationship with Clementine, make it a very engrossing game. The dangerous moments when zombies are closing in are definitely tense and I felt invested in the outcome of the story.

    The game’s one main weakness however is its rigidity. There is very little replay ability as your choices, while initially appearing relevant and game changing as you watch their results in the dialog and attitudes of the other characters you soon realize after playing the game a second time that they really have no result on the ultimate fate of anyone in the story. Every character will always end the same way, whether they leave the story in episode 2 or episode 5. They will meet the same fate whether it’s life or death. The same applies to you and Clementine. There is nothing you can do. There is very little change in the plot line, you will always go the same places and always do the same things. No matter what Lee says and no matter what he does. It all ultimately ends the same way. Which is disappointing to say the least for a game that is presented as being so heavily based on personal decisions.

    That being said it was well worth playing through once. The story is engrossing, the art style which is heavily comic book based is original and fun, the game play enjoyable, and the atmosphere truly perfect and at times terrifying.
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