We're off to a good start
The Walking dead Ep1 is a great start to what i hope is a great overall season. As an avid TWD fan i was excited to hear on the Bombcast that this was canonical and had a completely different story parallel to Rick and his crew. The Point and Click nature with the gripping story and some pretty harrowing QTEs really do help make the decisons in this game have more weight and immerse you into their struggle.
So first off if your playing it on XBLA, PSN and iOS your price of entry is only 5$ its a great way to get you hooked and buying the next episodes. Only drawback is this offer is not available on the PC, Mac versions since your essentially buying it a discount, also no Demo yet sadly.
Gameplay is your standard point and click affair, you don't have to manage inventory, so no string + gum get key tropes yet. Conversing with the characters of the world is done in a sort of timed Mass effect style dialog options. Personally i loved it, the relationships and conversations are really core to TWD and this mechanic really helped make those choices more meaningful in guiding Lee how the player wants. Most importantly there is certain events in-game where the player has to make quick decisions on someone's fate and the characters and dialog really help flesh that out. There is a few QTE's and mostly are there for tension and are pretty great i think, not hard just there to mix it up. Not a single puzzle to solve, don't know if this is deliberate or may be part of other episodes further on.
Story is awesome, you do get to meet some characters from the show like Glenn and Hershel. Without spoiling it too much, they do a pretty good job of somewhat making you care about them. probably my favorite part is when you have to kill Lee's brother to get the pharmacy keys. the whole ordeal has more added weight and emotion as the game forces you to continually click on his neck to kill him.The game does a great job with the story and I am excited to see where it goes and additionally at completion you get a little stats screen showing you what % of players made this decision instead of that and those do provide some replay-bility.
Dislikes:
- Episode 1 is sorta short, beat it just under 2 hours. but i feel this is to keep with the TV series like mentality.
- Graphical textures are somewhat buggy
- Audio quality is pretty poor, the VO is great but man it felt like really low bitrate mp3s or something (this was also an issue in BttF so I am not sure whats the solution)
- AMD card users like myself have been experiencing some Stuttering its really noticeable in the cutscenes but not existent in regular gameplay. (most probably a driver issue)
Overall really liked it, im excited for the next episode and see how my story progress. I feel that this was a excellent way of portraying the source material instead of turning it into a boring FPS or a some kind of weird action/platformer. Get it if your a fan of the series or want a more story driven experience.
-Zamano
