Sometimes a game just doesn’t work out. Despite lots of time, a strong property, and capable development talent, the experience fails to solidify. In the case of Overkill’s The Walking Dead, major technical problems and connection issues, baffling gameplay systems and controls, tedious combat and stealth, and poorly structured missions all contrive to halt the fun. A deep and rewarding upgrade and progression path hides behind the mess, but you’re unlikely to enjoy it, as the game fails to offer meaningful engagement.
In this four-player, first-person survival shooter, players take on new characters in The Walking Dead universe, but face gruesome challenges similar to those seen in the comic and TV shows. Working as a team, you scavenge for supplies and face off against enemy survivor groups, then defend your camp from those that would take what you have. The story is too bare-bones to hold up to scrutiny, though I appreciate the effort to surprise, including at least one cool character twist.
While purporting to be balanced for solo players or teams of various sizes, most missions are profoundly disheartening with anything less than a full four-person team. That’s a big problem, because matchmaking is spotty, and it is often unable to find me a matching team. Load times are long, and failure in a mission means starting over from the beginning. This can result in losing 30 minutes or more of time, with paltry rewards to show for the effort. When the games does manage to find a match, I’m often thrown in halfway through with the team already most of the way to failure. I’ve also encountered many hard crashes, together amounting to hours of lost progress.
Enemies are a mix of mindless undead and nearly mindless enemy survivors. The human enemies lack any of the tactical complexity you’d expect from any FPS of the last 10 years, often standing together in groups as you gun them down, even as they fail to animate in response to a hail of submachine gun bullets.
Gunplay is stiff and unresponsive. More prominent and frequent are lengthy sections of unsatisfying melee engagements. Whether bashing with a baseball bat or slashing with a machete, the close-up battles lack variety or panache, and regularly devolve into long stretches of standing in a doorway and repeatedly smashing the left mouse button for minutes at a time. A lackluster stealth system may as well be absent; it lacks sufficient cues to help you be successful, and the level design and enemy placements provide too few opportunities to be sneaky. A punishing sound meter discourages the use of your more interesting weapons and abilities, since it means that the zombie horde will soon descend. Upon death, an infuriatingly long respawn timer gives you just enough time to fume about the futility and loss of your free time.
The relatively small number of environments are confusing to navigate, with procedurally placed elements that frustrate as often as not, as you scramble around attempting to find the necessary jumper cables or gasoline. You’re encouraged to spend increasingly boring stretches scouring for additional bullets and supplies, slowing down any momentum a mission might have had.
The lone standout success is a rewarding progression system, which offers a lot to explore and plenty of opportunities for experimentation. Classes have their own leveling trees to improve abilities, though I would have liked more flexibility to customize what weapon skills each character can improve. As it is, if you like a particular ability, like the Scout’s smoke grenade, you’re obligated to go with her crossbow and pickaxe. Additional supplies let you upgrade your camp in a variety of ways, but you must balance your expenditures against the ongoing upkeep needs of your survivors, which makes for a compelling tension. As you gather more survivors, you can alternately send them out on missions or set them to work in the camp for some handy bonuses. Finally, a wide variety of weapons can be modded and improved over time. I appreciate the feature, but it also means that you’re wielding especially clumsy weapons in the early hours. Nonetheless, the growth of your camp and characters provides a sense that your missions have meaning, and may be enough to push you back into another banal scavenging run.
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.
Much like the mindless hordes it sics on you over and over, “Overkill’s The Walking Dead” is defined by repetition. It sends waves of the same zombies, the same puzzles, even the same levels after you over and over, and expects that its players share an unceasing, undiscerning hunger for “progress” — resources and better gear. This isn’t necessarily an unfair assumption — players love loot — but “Overkill’s The Walking Dead” leans too heavily on the prospect of a new gun or climbing a skill tree to sustain and satisfy on its own, while failing to connect that progression to its gameplay in a meaningful way.
Let’s get this out of the way: Though it shares a name with the popular TV show and comic books, “Overkill’s The Walking Dead” only offers the most superficial connection to the “Walking Dead” universe. Cobbling together a facsimile of the plot found in many of the series’ stories, the four player characters defend their post-apocalypse survivor camp in Washington D.C. as it is caught up in a conflict with a bigger, more belligerent group of survivors called “the family.” Though Overkill said the series takes place in the same world as the comic books and now-defunct developer Telltale’s adventure games — the shows and upcoming movies are their own thing — you’ll be hard-pressed to find a concrete connection.
Despite the lack of fan service, though, the spirit of “The Walking Dead” is present here. Overkill’s version of “The Walking Dead” blends elements of its 2013 hit “Payday 2” with the gear-driven gameplay of progression-fueled shooters like “Destiny 2” and, most directly, “Warhammer: Vermintide 2” to create a zombieland loot runner. Teams of up to four players push on linear paths through undead-infested streets, scouring every drawer and cabinet for items and gear on the way to a bigger objective, often to steal some equipment or supplies from hostile survivors.
Teams are forced to choose between short- and long-term survival tactics at every turn, which makes for interesting and intense situations. Firing guns, triggering car alarms, or making noise in any way attracts the attention of the “walkers” (That’s “Walking Dead” for zombies). Make enough noise to fill the zombie meter at the top of the screen, and groups of undead start to steadily converge on your position, injecting urgency and tension into every sequence. Your human opponents won’t hesitate to fire their guns, forcing you to choose between dealing with hordes of zombies that can number in dozens, or literally bringing a knife to a gun fight.
Like “Payday,” every mission requires teamwork, timing, and good communication to pull off. Puzzles force teams to split up to find items or solve puzzles, and zombies consistently on your heels, the difference between success and failure can come down to efficiency and chemistry. Likewise, healing items don’t come in great supply, but enemies do. It’s important to deal with even small combat scenarios as a group to preserve health. Things can spin out of control fast, but that only makes it more satisfying to successfully pull off a run as a team.
Unfortunately, “Overkill’s The Walking Dead“ cuts off its best gameplay at the knees by not featuring in-game voice chat. While It’s easy enough to set up a call with friends through Steam VoIP, Discord or Skype, the added steps make it unlikely that you’ll set up chat with players you meet through the game. You can get by with text chat if you have to, but failing to integrate some kind of chat into the game feels like a cardinal sin.
Even if you set up chat, though, those interesting elements of “Overkill’s The Walking Dead” are weighed down by a repetitious structure and RPG elements that fail to enhance it. Each player equips a melee weapon and two guns, which can be modified with silencers, sights, and other accessories that boost your character’s equipment score. While making that number go higher implies progress, using better gear feels mostly meaningless in the moment. You will spend the majority of your time pummeling or slicing through zombie crowds, where the weapon with timing and range that you understand beats higher level gear every time.
Likewise, Each of the four characters represents a class, each with their own abilities and weapon specializations. While some of the abilities can make a huge difference in the right situation, they come into play infrequently and do little to make each character stand out.
In between missions, there are a pack of systems to upgrade and resources to manage. Each success earns you supplies, which help to feed the other members of your camp who, in turn, can bring you additional resources and provide bonuses for future runs. You can also use those supplies to upgrade the camp, which unlocks access to more levels and abilities.
Managing the camp is technically necessary, but feels like mindless busywork. Though you visit your camp between missions, you never develop any strong connection to the members of your team or the camp’s leaders, because the dialogue among them is restricted to cliché one-liners. Without a connection to the camp, you don’t care if they live or die, which makes micromanaging the game’s extraneous measurements for progress feel pointless.
In fact, the whole cycle that defines “Overkill’s The Walking Dead” feels hollow. The story is an excuse to put players on missions, but who cares about the mission if you don’t care about your camp? The goal of the level is to bring back supplies and loot that upgrade your character, but why bother upgrading your character if it doesn’t make the game more exciting? 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.
Why did Overkill's The Walking Dead fail?
Dated graphics, lackluster gameplay and forced co-op all made the game feel too shallow and repetitive. It was an attempt on Starbreeze Studio's part to replicate the success of Payday and Payday 2 that failed spectacularly. This was nothing less than a mercy killing.
What is the new Walking Dead game overkill?
Overkill's The Walking Dead is a first-person shooter with an emphasis on cooperative gameplay. The game features four characters, namely Maya, Aidan, Grant, and Heather. Each has their own unique skills and abilities, and players must work together in order to complete their objectives.
Where can I play overkill The Walking Dead?
Global.
Xbox Game Pass Ultimate..
Xbox Live Gold..
PC games..
Windows digital games..
Can I run Overkill's The Walking Dead?
To play OVERKILL's The Walking Dead you will need a minimum CPU equivalent to an Intel Core i5-4460. Whereas, an Intel Core i7-4770K is recommended in order to run it. OVERKILL's The Walking Dead system requirements state that you will need at least 6 GB of RAM.