The final episode of the final season of The Walking Dead has outlasted Telltale Games but what kind of legacy will it leave?
Sony to stop selling PS4 game download codes in shops
The Walking Dead: The Final Season has had a troubled gestation, with developer Telltale Games first restructuring and then vanishing down to a skeleton staff midway through its run. That left the third and fourth instalments to be completed and released by Skybound Games, a division of Skybound Entertainment, who also publish the comic books on which The Walking Dead games are based.
The experience of playing The Final Season is seamless however, with the surviving characters behaving and responding exactly as they have throughout their often-brief arcs. It tells the story of Clementine and AJ, the little boy she adopted and looks after, despite only being a few years older than herself. Unlike the other survivors, AJ was born post-apocalypse and the only world he’s ever known is filled with zombies and sudden, violent death.
The result is that he’s a bit feral, and you, as Clementine, need to keep him as near to the straight and narrow as the ruined world will allow. That means making choices about what to say to him and which lessons to teach him, as well as demonstrating through your own actions how humans ought to behave towards one another. Naturally the path through the many situations you encounter is far from straightforward and as in real-life, starting with the best of intentions is not enough.
Also like real-life, there are many choices you’ll have to make where the potential outcome of your words and actions is far from clear. The snippets of text that lead to your next conversational gambit do a good job of illustrating what your character will say, but it’s often scant information in situations that can feel extremely dynamic. Quitting and replaying scenes lets you know that this is no illusion, and even relatively minor decisions can occasionally have far reaching ramifications.
The Final Season’s first episode introduced your gang of two to a former children’s boarding school, which rapidly starts to feel like home. That feeling of camaraderie is shattered by adult raiders in need of recruits to fight a war with a rival group. The second and third episodes work through your tangle with the mean-spirited grown-ups, including a surprise blast from Clem’s past, before the plot’s loose ends are slightly too neatly tied up in episode four.
Without dropping any spoilers, and in deference to the fact that there are several possible end states, depending on the choices you’ve made and who you’ve either killed or allowed to be shot, devoured, or stabbed the denouement is unusually upbeat. It was never going to have a Disney ending, but you may be left feeling that the spirit of optimism is far from warranted given the ultra-precarious situation the very small number of surviving children are left in.
Wearying plot developments aside, The Walking Dead suffers from a number of other problems. Although The Final Season features improvements over past releases, with extra player freedom and a desire to make action sequences seem less like a series of boring QTEs, there’s a gulf between the conversations and everything else. While the former have clearly had a lot of love lavished upon them – with excellent writing, believable characters, and a real sense of affecting the course of events – the latter feel like clunky afterthoughts.
Along with hitting button cues that pop up on screen, you’ll also need to manoeuvre wobbly reticules into circles, and hammer buttons as quickly as you can. Compared with the intricacy of the characters’ relationships, these sections are farcically poor and feel like little more than padding before the next serious talk. Having to retry a feeble, under-designed moment of violence several times adds nothing to the sense of tension and is just the opposite of fun.
Graphically things are no better, with the game’s cel-shaded comic book appearance ageing badly, along with the weirdly stilted motion of its human characters. The walkers at least look about right, lurching around like drunkards, but for everyone else it only serves to increase the difficulty of suspending disbelief.
There are some genuinely heartstring-twanging scenes and you really feel for Clem and her increasingly wayward charge. However, the crumminess of the action, that breaks up the pivotal vocal exchanges, never fails to give you a sinking feeling the second you leave a scene where everyone just wants to have a good old chat and head back out into the woods.
The whole season has also been afflicted by game-breaking bugs. We spent several days attempting to play episodes only for the game to lock up on the loading screen or crash before it could get that far. Deleting everything, reinstalling from scratch, and disconnecting the console from the Internet eventually made it possible to continue, but that’s not a process that inspires joy and contentment.
When The Walking Dead first emerged in 2012 it was mould-breaking. Its real-seeming protagonists and solemn, sometimes heartbreaking action, as well as its willingness to dispense with compelling, central characters without a word of warning, made everything feel new and dangerous. Unfortunately, the series failed to evolve, and while the same positive qualities are present in The Final Season, we’ve seen it all before.
We’ve also seen other games do it better, in particular Dontnod’s excellent Life Is Strange and its sequel, which look and play far better than this. If you’ve stuck with the series to this point, the last four episodes are worth playing despite having to make it through the technical problems and head-shakingly misconceived action sequences, but if Skybound wants to continue the franchise, it’s going to need an almighty reboot.
The Waking Dead: The Final Season Episode 4
In Short: The Walking Dead finishes much as it began, with believable characters making heartbreaking choices, interspersed with flounderingly inept, QTE-laden attempts at action.
Pros: Authentic characters, a catalogue of genuine threats to their survival, and a real sense of consequence to your decisions. Players will remember that.
Cons: The battle sequences are terrible, the dated graphics do nothing for your sense of immersion, and you regularly have to make choices with only a minimal clue as to their outcome.
Score: 6/10
Formats: PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
Price: £18.99 (season pass)
Publisher: Skybound Games
Developer: Skybound Games
Release Date: 14th August 2018 (Switch TBA)
Age Rating: 18
By Nick Gillett
Email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk, leave a comment below, and follow us on Twitter
