The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival
Developer: Odaclick Game Studio
Publisher: Trailmark Games
Platforms: Xbox Series X (Reviewed), PlayStation 5, PC, Switch, Switch 2
Release Date: Available Now
Price: $19.99 USD – Available Here
Overview
The popularity of The Walking Dead at one time was astronomical. The television show from AMC had fans eager to watch every week to see who might live or die and even had an aftershow every episode to keep fans engaged. That type of popularity usually translates well into video game form but outside of a certain Telltale Games series, that just wasn’t the case for The Walking Dead as nearly every attempt to bring the story to life ended up as dead as the walkers shuffling around.
Now, long after the main series has ended but with AMC continuing the franchise with multiple spin-offs, we have The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival, a side-scrolling brawler that takes and focuses on a single, and probably most popular, arc from the TV series. The question is, does this brawler take full advantage of its potential or does it once again fall short of fan hopes?
Story
The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival follows the AMC television show to the letter, picking up immediately during the events as Alexandria falls to Negan and his Saviors. Rick has sent Michonne ahead with Carl to the evacuation point in the sewers and is stuck battling against Negan who is determined to hunt him down. After managing to survive the encounter and escape from the Saviors, Rick reunites with Michonne only to find that Carl had been bitten before and is dying. With the residents of Alexandria on the run, Rick, Michonne, and Daryl must do what they can to guide their people somewhere safe with Daryl clearing the sewers to Hilltop while Rick and Michonne seek out help from the Scavengers, only to find they have suffered the same fate.
From then on it becomes a battle of attrition with Michonne and Daryl doing their best to protect Hilltop while Rick hunts down Negan for revenge, finding that there will only be one way that this will come to an end. With one of these leaders being put down, even if it goes against the letters and wishes left behind by Carl in his final moments.
Now for anyone that has watched the television show, The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival will carry no surprises, other than that one of the triple branched missions that see Rick, Daryl, and Michonne splitting up to weaken various parts of the Saviors’ defenses, feeling entirely like filler as it serves no real narrative purpose. Otherwise every other event will play out exactly the same as it did throughout the show, all the way through to the final battle location right as the credits start to roll. This means that not only is the game incredibly short, clocking in at under four hours and that is with finding nearly every collectable, it also feels like it barely scratches its potential.
While it is clear that Negan and his Saviors were obviously the most popular villains, as evidenced by the fact that Negan is still kicking around in Dead City with Maggie all these years later, it also feels like this is a game that should have embraced way more of The Walking Dead’s narrative than hyper-focusing solely on the Saviors. Rick’s initial wake-up, the farm and subsequent fallout, The Governor, or even smaller factions like Terminus or The Wolves . There’s barely any hints that Maggie even exists, no mention of Glenn’s fate prior to this, nor even mention that Carol exists despite the fact that she could easily have been a fighter as well.
The slightest hints come in the form of “lore items” that are often barely a paragraph of text and tend to have nothing to do with the plot or characters as a whole which makes this far more disappointing than one would hope, especially since it could have tapped into numerous earlier story arcs before leading up to Negan. Instead players are left with an extremely short and extremely narrow focused title that keeps only three playable characters despite the large cast to work with and a fourth unlockable character we won’t spoil here, but changes nothing narratively even when used in levels.
Gameplay
The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival is a brawler through and through with a small mix of “survival horror” mixed in. This aspect comes in the form that players will need to almost always rely on melee weapons while making limited use of the ammo that they come across for their primary firearm or weapons scavenged from the field. Even the medkits are limited with players only able to initially carry three at a time and taking time to use, healing slowly as the character kneels down to bandage their wounds and slowly refill their lost health. If the character is hit while healing, or shortly after even, they will lose all of their restored health and the medkit as well, making the timing of when to heal vital in surviving some encounters.
As a brawler it is interesting to note that the three primary playable characters mostly play the same way, with a combo of light attacks being able to be chained into a heavy finisher and some characters even having the ability to chain melee attacks into a ranged finisher. Each character can also make use of a kick to gain space or break an enemy’s attack stance or dodge roll out of danger, with each of these on small cooldowns. The real differences come from the equipment they bring into a fight and upgrades that they can have unlocked. Rick for example is a heavyweight fighter with an extremely powerful revolver that can pierce multiple enemies if fired at the critical shot point (smallest reticle), Daryl is the fastest attacker able to combo enemies quickly using his dual knives and can eliminate enemies silently with his crossbow that can also pierce multiple enemies if aimed properly. Finally we have Michonne who is primarily a melee character who focuses almost entirely on her samurai sword to dispatch foes but, unlike the other two, can pick up and carry both a light firearm and heavy firearm at the same time but she will never swap her katana out for a temporary melee weapon.
Among the three primary characters Michonne feels the strongest, especially as players upgrade her melee capabilities and ability to generate adrenaline automatically, making it easy to perform finishing moves for massive damage more often. Every character’s skill tree may share the same pool of resources, such as kill count expanding the amount of skills players can learn, the “knowledge” required to obtain a skill, but not the skills themselves. Every character’s skills must be learned separately from one another, encouraging players to select their favorite even if some stages require players to only control Daryl or Rick, with only a few missions giving players the option to select any of the three.
In a rather strange way to earn “knowledge” players will kill various enemies or loot objects in the world and gain knowledge points for doing so, though there really is no indication as to why, feeling like something of a shoehorned mechanic, Most levels also feature two or more “lore items” scattered throughout the level as well as a character progression item, since some skills on the upgrade tree require specific items such as Broadhead Arrow Tips for Daryl, Gun Parts for Rick, and Wrappings for Michonne.
The bosses throughout the game are something of a mixed bag as most bosses simply revolve around a basic mechanic of either dodging out of the way or throwing grenades back at them and little else. There is one boss that is far more complicated but can be defeated through brute force even if players can’t figure out the puzzle involved. That being said, the combat does feel a bit strange and floaty at times, especially when it looks like players should be hitting an enemy Savior or Walker only to find themselves swinging at empty air and eating a gunshot from the Savior or grab from a Walker. Similarly the random hitboxes of some foes feels incredibly strange at times and boss HP bars feel as if they have a lag to them, with bosses still showing nearly half-health suddenly dying.
One thing that is also currently a massive issue with the Xbox Series X version of the game is potentially a massive bug that has not been patched at the time of this writing. If the player has to quit the game for any reason and let the title enter the “Quick Resume” state, not only will the game not track any achievement progression, it will also not save any of the player’s actual progression from that point on. This means that even if players take a break a few missions in and then power through and beat the game, unlocking New Game+ and the fourth playable character, they can find themselves starting the game back up only to find the game treating it as it never happened, putting players back at the missions they were at before the last Quick Resume session, resetting progress which is incredibly annoying despite the short length of the game.
Audio & Visuals
For the most part The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival does a really solid job on replicating the appearances of the primary main characters that appear throughout the story in the retro pixel format. Daryl looks a little rough but both Michonne and Rick, including his bonus costume in the deluxe edition, look impressive. The enemy designs are also nicely varied, at least when it comes to the walkers that players will need to take down as almost all of the Saviors are designed after their role, so players will immediately know what their attacks will be from their appearance.
As for the Saviors themselves, there is no gore compared to zombie heads being blown up or sliced apart and while Negan of course looks perfect and a few other notable high ranking members of the Saviors are given accurate representation, the rest are incredibly generic. Outside of one character that fans should easily recognize though he is dispatched the same as any other foe but never is duplicated. It is nice to note that the backgrounds of most levels are at least fairly fitting as players fight through parts of Alexandria, Hilltop, and into Sanctuary, though a few stage designs are also rather generic in-between, feeling like filler.
The game features no real voice work of any kind. There are small voice clips from each of the playable characters that play when the player selects them to fight in a stage but other than that there is no talking, only groans and cries of pain during combat. The background music throughout the game is fitting given the nature of the title as well as the retro stylings.
Overall
The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival is a fairly solid adaptation of AMC’s version of events between Rick and Negan even if it retreads ground that has already been walked on a hundred times and doesn’t tap into any of the other potential villains or arcs that the long running franchise could have pulled from. This retro brawler is fun to play albeit without a co-op option and has some decent challenge to boot. But even then, with its shorter runtime this brawler is purely for The Walking Dead fans, or simply fans of the genre eager for something new.
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