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The Walking Dead: Season 1 Review: Fun Times in a Zombie Apocalypse

After a huge delay for Android devices, we have TellTale’s The Walking Dead season 1 on Google Play for all devices. Was the delay worth it though? Let’s have a look.

For those of you not familiar with The Walking Dead (all 3 of you), it’s a comic book, game and TV series based around the zombie apocalypse and most importantly, the consequences it has on humanity. The stories usually take place around a group of survivors and their encounters with other humans, while zombies are left in the background as a “part of the environment”. This is especially obvious in the TellTale game, where finding food or even simply getting along with the other survivors seems to be a much bigger issue than the actual zombies.

In the game, you’ll be taking the role of Lee Everett, former history teacher at a university, now a convicted murderer on his way to prison. As you’re being driven there, the police officer gets a bit too chatty (don’t get distracted while driving folks!) and hits a zombie on the highway. This results him losing control of the car and crashing on the side of the road, leaving you unconscious for a while. After you wake up, you find yourself with a serious cut on your leg and the policeman dead near the car. Like any sensible person with handcuffs and in a car crash, you break out of the car and check up on the officer to see if he’s alive and get the keys in the process. As you might expect from the way he looks, as soon as your handcuffs are off, he turns into a zombie and tries to have some breakfast (that being you). After killing him, you find yourself around even more zombies, so you run through the forest into a nearby house and here is where the actual story begins, and seeing how the first episode is free, I will not spoil more of it for you.

The characters themselves are extremely well written for a game. Every character has a well defined personality and view on what’s going on, but the coolest thing is that depending on your actions, your relationship with the characters can change, changing scenes and dialog in the game, and in some cases, decide if a character gets to live or die.

The game itself has been out for PC and iOS for quite a while now, so the big question is – what’s the difference between the PC and Android version and was the delay worth it? Well, let’s get started.

First thing you’ll notice if you played the PC version is that the interactivity is greatly reduced. Many scenes that were player-controlled have now been replaced with automated character actions that you have no control over. This is a change I feel is very unnecessary since the actual controls work just fine in the rest of the game. Choice boxes on the other hand are a different issue – the time to choose a dialog option is the same as the PC version, which is not really a good thing since playing on a much smaller screen means text is also smaller, making it harder to read. On the other hand, most dialog scenes have perfect timing with the background dialog/animation so extending them might break the scene flow, so maybe the better solution would be to just make the boxes a bit larger.

The graphics have also taken a pretty considerable downgrade, which is made perfectly clear in the opening scene where you’re driven out the city where there’s a large view distance. Up close and in narrow locations though, the graphics stick to proper PC version quality, however sometimes scene-decoration still seems to be removed. The performance seems to be acceptable and my tests on the Samsung Galaxy S2 GT-i9100 (which is slightly above the minimum requirements) shows around 23-35fps. One thing you might want to do if you’re using Android 4.1 or higher is to go in your “developer options” menu and force “4x MSAA” which will improve the graphics a bit in man scenes.

The audio and character dialog is on-par with the PC version, with everything sounding just fine all the time, even when you don’t use any headphones (though using a pair is recommended if you want to fully enjoy it).

Before I conclude, there is one important issue you need to be aware of: the download of the game includes episode 1 only and is approximately 1.2GB, which is just like any other game, however, each other episode is an additional 350-400MB, which is also fine, except one small problem – they are downloaded on the internal storage. For those that are not familiar, “internal storage” is the place usually reserved for installing games and apps (which the user can’t normally go in), while “SDcard” is the place where game data and everything else generally goes. The issue is that on most phones, the internal storage is 2GB total, which means if you want to install the full game, you’ll essentially need to remove all other games and apps you have. This does not affect all devices (many new ones don’t use this system), but the majority still do, so you should keep that in mind.

The final thing you might be interested is the business model. As you can see on the Google Play page, the game is initially free, which includes the first episode out of six. Each following episode is a separate in-app purchase that will cost you 3.59€ (roughly $5), with the option to buy a season pass for 10.89€ (approximately $15). So the question is “is it worth buying?”…well, I personally have a very hard time recommending it. While the game is still a solid experience, the numerous downgrades in gameplay (not including graphics) and the issue with the additional downloads, I think $15 might be a bit too much for some people, especially since the PC version is often found for $15 on Steam as well. If you see it on sale however or if some of the issues get fixed, then yes, I would recommend it.

To close out this review, I would also like to add that season 2 was just released for Android as well (for Amazon KindleFire HD only at this point), which takes place where season 1 ends, so if you grabbed season 1 and want more, you probably won’t have to wait much longer.

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