The Walking Dead Onslaught Review – Stab, Grab, Rinse, Repeat

The Strolling Lifeless Onslaught Overview

The Walking Dead and digital actuality. It looks like it’s a wedding made in online game heaven. And April’s The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners proved that it undoubtedly will be, if finished proper. Now, a brand new VR expertise for The Strolling Lifeless followers shuffles its approach onto the PSVR: The Strolling Lifeless Onslaught. Get in your headsets and replenish on ammo, people, ‘trigger it’s zombie killing time as soon as once more.

Like Saints and Sinners, The Strolling Lifeless Onslaught has you play in first-person view however this time as varied characters from the TV present. You’ll see a couple of acquainted faces, together with fan-favorites like Darryl and Michonne. You’re all a part of the Alexandria settlement, identical to the AMC collection, combating to eke out some semblance of safety amidst the zombie infestation. By way of a mix of cut-scenes and missions, your settlement takes form and also you progress by means of the sport’s story.

The Strolling Lifeless Onslaught makes use of the Hub system, together with your settlement because the crux, and also you venturing out from it briefly on every mission. Your objective is to rebuild and strengthen your fledgling neighborhood by choosing up provides and improve supplies throughout your missions, which you then can use upon profitable completion. You too can unlock new characters who will be a part of your settlement, bringing with them bonuses like new constructing blueprints.

Get Out There and Kill Some Walkers

It’s a easy and interesting system that’s straightforward to study, and the joys of seeing your small city slowly enhance and develop after you come back type a visit outdoors the partitions is a satisfying suggestions loop of gameplay. It additionally provides good sense of rigidity to missions, forcing you to continuously select whether or not to discover each nook and nook of a map to search out extra of these much-needed provides, or focus in your security and the objective of simply getting again dwelling alive.

The missions themselves have some gratifying facets, particularly at first. You’re given a skinny narrative set-up after which it’s off to kill some zombies. Quite a lot of the missions are flash-backs wherein you’re taking the position of Daryl himself, and these are additionally the mode by which the narrative is conveyed to you. You additionally generally simply go on supply-runs as varied characters. Narrative depth is a bit missing, however that didn’t hassle me for the primary couple of minutes since I used to be having fun with simply killing zombies.

Most missions are easy: transfer by means of a linear course that has a couple of potential pathways, to a set vacation spot, all whereas avoiding varied undead alongside the best way. Motion is ok, well incorporating all of the latest VR choices together with free motion and snap turning. Nevertheless it all begins to develop tiresome fairly shortly. There isn’t a number of mission selection and also you’ll get that “been there, finished that” feeling consuming away at you want a hungry walker earlier than too lengthy. The environments themselves are additionally uninspired, normally the identical alleyways or rooms plagued by crates and particles forcing you into set routes. Ending a mission rewards you with constructing upgrades and new recipes, however then it’s again on the market for an additional mission, and so forth again and again.

Certain, there are a few occasions the place the components is modified up a bit. One variation has you shifting although a mission attempting to seize as many provides as you’ll be able to earlier than The Horde, represented by an encroaching pink zone, catches up with you and kills you. One other time, you must survive for a sure time till you’re rescued. However regardless of these weak makes an attempt, it’s telling that even they don’t provide a lot distinction from the vast majority of missions.

Throughout missions, in the event you can’t keep away from a zombie, you’ll should kill them. The Strolling Lifeless Onslaught has a couple of fight choices; you need to use numerous handguns, shotguns, even machine weapons you discover alongside the best way, or there are melee options like knives and wrenches. Sadly, utilizing weapons isn’t fairly as enjoyable accurately, for a couple of causes. First, there may be their underpowered nature. Enemies take in a number of photographs earlier than they go down, even with shotguns, so I discovered myself both working out of ammo or simply getting annoyed and switching to melee.

Bringing a Knife to a Gunfight

Secondly is the aiming, particularly for two-handed weapons. Utilizing the Transfer controllers, that are obligatory in The Strolling Lifeless Onslaught, you will need to seize some weapons in two locations to intention them. However I discovered that protecting the weapons regular whereas holding them was simply too finicky and unreliable. Between the annoying jiggle of the two-handers and the weak stopping energy of virtually all of the weapons, I discovered myself avoiding them in favour of melee weapons after some time.

Even melee fight, so satisfying at first, obtained to be too repetitive in The Strolling Lifeless Onslaught. My go-to was the searching knife, and it was straightforward to get an insta-kill head shot on zombies by studying to time the swing of my Transfer controller. Dispatching countless waves of walkers this fashion turned from enjoyable to tedious after some time, although, because the preliminary thrill of the attention socket shank gave solution to boredom. Swiping down again and again, I felt like a dead-eyed bureaucrat stamping paperwork, besides these have been zombies as a substitute of papers, and my stamp was a knife. How ironic that in enjoying The Strolling Lifeless: Onslaught, it was I who unwittingly grew to become the zombie…

If you’re a fan of the TV present, The Strolling Lifeless Onslaught provides some cool moments the place you work together together with your favourite characters. Solely with a couple of, although, do you get the precise actor’s voice – a notable instance being Norman Reedus as Daryl. Others characters are of various levels of high quality – the voice of Rick Grimes, to call one, didn’t actually sound to me just like the particular person from TV in any respect. There’s additionally the truth that the character fashions are crudely rendered and missing intimately at occasions; general I had a tough time immersing myself within the recreation and didn’t really feel like I used to be actually inhabiting the universe of The Strolling Lifeless, regardless of the references to the present sprinkled right here and there.

That goes for the zombies as effectively – and let’s face it, they’re an important side. An enormous a part of the enjoyable in a recreation like The Strolling Lifeless: Onslaught ought to be the pants-crapping terror you are feeling being confronted by precise fricking zombies in digital actuality. However the low-res, fundamental fashions simply didn’t make me really feel actually scared, and I used to be dissatisfied that I felt so blasé throughout most of my playtime, even when surrounded by hordes of undead flesh-eaters.

I believe The Strolling Lifeless Onslaught may come off extra positively if we hadn’t simply skilled the greatness of Saints and Sinners just some months in the past. That recreation felt way more concerned and immersive, with an awesome story that left an impression. By comparability, The Strolling Lifeless Onslaught feels skinny, and missing in that environment of desperation we’d anticipate from spending a while within the zombie apocalypse. For those who’re a fan of The Strolling Lifeless franchise and starvation for extra zombie killing, the missions, gameplay and story in The Strolling Lifeless Onslaught usually are not unhealthy. However in the event you’re searching for one thing deeper to sink your enamel into, keep on with Saints and Sinners.

** A PSVR recreation code was supplied by the writer **