The Walking Dead: Episode 1 gets first review

Any zombie tale can depict hordes of ravenous undead; the hard part is making us care about the living survivors of the apocalypse. Much like the comic book it’s based on, the Walking Dead game stresses intense character drama over bloody action, and to our delight, its first episode mines this plot-driven approach for pure gold.

Made by Telltale Games, The Walking Dead works like a mix of the studio’s point-and-click adventures and its cinematic, button-prompt–based Jurassic Park game. Much of this episode is conversation, where you have one of four dialogue options; other times, you’re searching for items (radio batteries, a key) or clicking buttons to fight off zombies. Though you’ll do everything from axe ghouls in the head to stab them through the eye, combat occurs sparingly.

That lets the game focus on its story, which runs parallel to the events of the comic starting from the beginning of the outbreak. You play as convicted felon Lee Everett, who — after a car crash on his way to jail — meets and becomes protector to an orphaned young girl, Clementine. As you seek shelter you’ll team up with new characters and a few seen in the comics, including Glenn, Hershel, and Lilly (an ally of the Governor).



The dialogue and story are engrossing in their own right, but what makes all of your interactions even more compelling is just how much your choices affect the game. Sometimes, it’s through conversation: what you tell Hershel about yourself, for example, determines how much he trusts you later, while being kind or ruthless toward a woman who’s been bitten by a zombie impacts the emotional scene that follows. Other times, you have key decision points like choosing whether to travel during day or night (which affects who you meet in subsequent scenes) or picking which of two characters to save. These life-or-death decisions have particularly big ripples, as they determine not only who befriends you in this episode but even who will accompany you after that, as the games’ decisions span all five of Walking Dead’s episodes, Telltale says.



This mass of branching paths gives you an amazing feeling of control in such a short (two- to three-hour) game. But even without it, this episode dazzled us. Everything from its brisk pace to its gorgeous, comic-booky visuals to Lee and Clementine’s sweet friendship just feels right. Unlike so many zombie games, its story is human instead of hokey, and it helps make The Walking Dead, Episode 1 slam-bang entertainment.




+ Striking art style and cinematic presentation, especially for a $5 XBLA game.

+ Point-and-click conversations and adventuring are fun, intuitive, and engaging.

+ Tons of branching paths mean your dialogue choices and actions matter (in this game and later episodes).

9/10



Loving the art style on this and the fact that it's only 400 points is a big bonus, day one for me

will definitly get this as i loved the series not for just the goryness but the story.
and having actions decide what happens in the future is always a plus note in games.
the look of the game is good to look at
wonder is the fighting controls point or click or does that change when you encounter zombies