The Walking Dead Destinies Review

"Change Your Fate"

Campaign

December 10, 2023 at 5:06pm
By Jason Stettner

Well; the game certainly does run, so that’s something. The concept of The Walking Dead Destinies is actually rather fascinating. You replay the first few seasons of the show, or well the greatest hits and make choices that impact core characters. You choose to kill someone that didn’t die in one spot and that adjusts what happens later down the road.

It’s again, an interesting but niche concept to dive into. The execution is however rather pitiful and the experience lackluster to mundane. One of the core issues right off the bat is that the choices don’t always work. I chose something that killed Carl off and then Shane alongside Rick were talking in the very scene about how they want to take care of the kid.

That’s like a basic element of a choice driven setup, is the consistency to the canon you’re creating. I mean, this is just the least of the issues but showcases that even the story bit doesn’t even work here. The narrative being delivered through straight up freeze frame cinematics.

Anyways, you play the key moments from the show in buggy, brief cut up pieces. If you have little to no understanding of the show, you will however be completely lost as it just jumps along. I do understand why, there’s a lot of narrative moments to hit and it’s still about five hours of play I suppose.

It just really doesn’t make much sense, having even watch the show in the past which makes this harder to fully understand. The missions themselves are tight, linear and somewhat awkward. Looking at you weird box moving segments meant to pad time. It really does sort of feel like something that should have come out a couple generations of gaming ago to tie into the actual series itself.

Gameplay

This is an essential aspect of any game, but yeah this one is not fun to play. Among the various bugs such as audio not working during cutscenes or objects in the world missing it’s sort of ridiculous. It has this gameplay loop where characters get scared or have adrenaline and can’t do anything helpful. It basically rips the Dead Rising push zombies off system and at times you just get overwhelmed dying in awkward ways.

There’s also an issue where they re-use the same environments many times over. It’s a limited experience, and to re-use the same spaces just seems they had no budget to work with. I actually feel somewhat bad for the developers as you can tell they tried, kinda. The voice work isn’t great either and the music repeats. The skill system is broken as you can respawn a checkpoint keeping your stats and getting more skill points.

The weapons are awkward, the stealth system doesn’t really work. It’s a lot of really dysfunctional, poorly compiled pieces of a broken package. It does run at a 4k resolution with 60fps on Xbox Series X so there’s that aspect. It doesn’t look great, but it’s cleanish. The environments do have density, but they were tiny. It’s also just generally not that visually impressive from character models to world textures and it’s all just so basic.

The Conclusion

The Walking Dead Destinies is a rather abysmal attempt at what’s actually an interesting concept, a situation releasing far too late for its intended era while playing like it would at that time. It’s sort of neat to see how characters would fair with differing setups but you don’t really get to know the characters.

You basically had to play the show and even past that you spend little to no time with many of the side characters. You revisit the same tiny spaces doing a linear, often lame activity with a selection of re-used enemies. Again, I somewhat feel bad for the developers as I can tell they had no budget to really work with and tried to put something together.

It’s just, really bad and unless you’re a truly die-hard fan this is truly awful. It’s so weird that something like this exists in the modern gaming era, it was quite an experience of frustration and perplexion. Again, it is playable. It didn’t crash and I was able to complete it in a sitting. So that’s something. I guess. I mean, none of it really makes any sense.

Read our Dead Rising 4 Review
View our The Walking Dead Hub

The Walking Dead Destinies Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by Kane22222

Rating Overall: 3.0