OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead (PC – later: PS4, Xbox One) is longed for by Cortyn. The game combines everything a fresh co-op title needs.
Zombie games have become tiresome for many gamers by now. No wonder, in recent years we’ve been inundated with zombie apocalypses to the point that probably the entire world’s population has been used as shuffling corpses multiple times over. Nevertheless, there is one “zombie game” that has reignited my hype completely: OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead.
But what has fueled my hype?
A mix of Left 4 Dead and The Last of Us
So far, everything indicates that OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead will be the perfect mix of two games that I adored.
- In Left 4 Dead (2), I spent countless hours racing with friends through the maps and slaughtering zombies. There was no better feeling than smashing zombies’ skulls with a katana (or in Ellis’s case: with a frying pan).
- The second game was The Last of Us. A dense story, coupled with a dark atmosphere, stealth gameplay, and limited resources. Plus, complex characters with great interactions and many small details to discover.
OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead seems to be the perfect combination of both genres.
Gameplay, as I wish it to be
The gameplay scenes shown so far are magnificent. There always seem to be multiple ways to deal with problems as a team. Do you massacre the zombies one by one and stealthily? Do you lure the zombies to hostile survivors? Or do you simply bypass them altogether?
I also really like the team options. Two enemies guard the exit of a building. You mark the two enemies so that your teammates are alerted, and then you sneak around them. Once both players are in position, they execute a stealth kill simultaneously to silently eliminate the nuisances. How that unfolds is shown in this mission from E3:
Even these small details please me so much that I already know there will be many funny situations.
Moreover, each character has unique abilities and thus takes on a specific role in the team. While one character is particularly adept at stealth and can take out enemies silently, another is especially good at treating wounds. The latter is bitterly necessary, as every now and then you will be surprised and overwhelmed by a zombie.
The only downside that I notice so far is that the hostile survivor NPCs behave rather foolishly in the shown scenes.
Sympathetic, relatable characters
Well, if we’re honest, the zombie scenario has been quite overdone in the last 10 years. There is probably no gamer who hasn’t somewhat followed some zombie franchise. Be it Left 4 Dead, The Walking Dead, DayZ, or one of the many other variations with the undead.
Nevertheless, I am grabbed by the hype and anticipation right away, as the characters are brilliantly portrayed. The four introductory trailers for the different characters clearly convey what kind of people they are, what values they stand for – and they are also incredibly relatable.
Normally, I have difficulty finding a character in shooters whose story I can relate to – but in Overkill’s The Walking Dead, I would love to play them all.
To give you a little preview, here is the story trailer for Heather – I will probably choose this character:
Of course, there is still the danger that it all might burst like a soap bubble and the game could be a terrible disappointment. So far, however, I see no signs for that, and the material shown so far from the game confidently indicates that OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead will once again bring my circle of friends together to slaughter zombies.
I can hardly wait for OTWD. Even better that the beta starts next week – on October 9, 2018. The actual release on PC is on November 6, PS4 and Xbox One follow in February 2019. Now I just have to get time off work…
