Overkill's Walking Dead is a profoundly flawed game that most zombie game fans should avoid for now. The game was supposedly created over a period of four years, by the developers of Payday 2, but instead the title feels like a very complex mod or early access game/beta. The game centers on five survivors that live within the District of Columbia. Each character has a unique set of abilities and weapon bonuses. Heather/Reina is a scout and utilizes the crossbow to perform silent mid-range kills. Her main power is the smoke grenade, which, in theory, provides cover and slows enemies. Grant is the long-range sniper specialist and uses the quarter staff to fantastic melee effect. His power is the molotov which lights tons of enemies. Maya is the support class and utilizes SMGs, which are lousy, inaccurate messes in the game. Her power however is the overwhelmingly valuable medbag. Finally, Aidan is the tank and utilizes the baseball bat, silenced shotguns and his power is the poor flashbang.

Now that we've got all the classes out of the way, let's underscore that none of this matters since the weapon bonuses each class gets for the weapons are absolutely worthless. I leveled Reina, the crossbowman, with sniper rifles, forgoing the bonuses and succeeded marvelously. That's because sniper rifles are by far the most powerful ranged weapons in the game. In melee, the quarterstaff, the machete and ice axe are king and every other melee is a poor shadow, doing less damage and taking a higher equivalent weapon level to perform one-hit kills. The gameplay is deeply flawed, relying on horde wave missions for 33% of the total game. The AI is brutally attrocious. While the zombies react brilliantly to sound, they also see you at times, regardless of how well you're hidden. That itself could be forgiven if the human AI worked well but instead Overkill provided them with telescopic laser vision in order to compensate for their brutally stupid "intelligence". AI can't flank. They don't navigate through weapon fire properly. They often shoot you while looking away from you. Sneaking is hit or miss. They move in janky bouts of super speed or brutal clumsiness and Overkill blessed their snipers with super invincibility. In the final levels of the game, you'll face dozens of snipers wearing dorky football helmets that absorb up to 2 sniper rounds before you are even allowed to score a headshot, even if you aim for the exposed areas of the face.

The storyline focusing on the characters is non-existent and once one of the four main characters dies on mission 4, you're left nonplussed since you never learned anything about any of the characters. The entire game plot amounts to: Attacked by the family. Repel a zombie horde. Repel the family attack. Oh noes, they stole our water purifier. Get it back! Steal one of their radios. Steal their boss. Whoops, the Famliy is actually not as bad as the Brigade, another, different interchangeable antagonist. Attacked by the Brigade. Flee your base. Stumble like idiots in the sewer hitting a bunch of levers to open a door. Steal medical supplies. Assassinate some thugs. Steal some supplies from thugs. Liberate some survivors. Attacked by the Brigade again. Kill their second in command, Hurst, who has 6 lines in the whole game. The end. That's it. That's the game. And if you succeed in each mission, the game can be completed in 10 story-bereft hours. Don't expect to care about the characters. There's almost zero characterization.

All of this could be forgiven if the game actually *ran* properly. It is a disaster. The update system is absolute trash. I pre-downloaded the 19.3 GB game the day before the release. On release day, they disseminated a 125 MB patch. No problem, as I have a 65 Mb/s connection right? Wrong. Downloading, unpacking and installing that update took over an HOUR. And each subsequent update takes crazy amounts of time. Some updates take as much as 30 minutes. None take less than 10, despite being 25 MB in size. The game loads poorly, even on my SSD with 32 GB of RAM. Expect to see the same stupid Red-Zombie skull splash screen. Out of my 75 hours of play time, I'm not kidding when I say that at *least* one hour of that time was spent staring at the screen.

The game looks good at high settings but doesn't look better than Dying Light despite needing higher system requirements. The network code is abject vomit. If any player joins a game in L4D 2 or CoD or Battlefield, you feel nary a thing. Here the game hitches and seizes with a fraction of the playerbase, often ruining progress through a difficult area of the mission. Did you traverse into a new zone of the map? More seizing occurs. And I'm not talking about a minor dip for a few seconds. I'm talking about 5-10 fps for a good 5-10 seconds, while surrounded by brutally difficult walkers. Just as bad is the janky hitboxes where headshots miss through phantom heads or where a solid strike to the head is ignored as the zombies grasp you anyways.

If zombies hit maximum 3-Dot panic level, they become practically untennable but since the game has no server browser and relies on blind matchmaking, expect to have a plethora of idiots ruining your careful 30-50 minutes of stealthing on a whim or through sheer, stupendous idiocy. Luckily, I had a friend playing with me and we were able to clutch our way through a series of these situations but I sympathize with loner players that lack that advantage since most missions, on the easiest difficulty, are practically impossible on solo. The game also has a bogus camp-upgrading/happiness mechanic that has almost no legitimate effect on your own experience in the missions. Oh and you can find an NPC called a Wanderer and feed him a lot of rare, valuable and amazing weapons and items to get....trash that's weaker than what you have.

All in all, Walking Dead confirms four things for me:
1. This game is 2 weeks old and already long dead. The total playerbase has never exceeded 15000 players. Let me repeat that fact. The playerbase has never exceeded 15000 players. The current playerbase fluctuates between 1000 and 4000 max players a scant TWO weeks later. The game is dead and has far too many technical issues to be salvaged.

2. I'm never buying another Overkill game. Between Payday 2 and this crapshow, I'm done spending 60 USD on unfinished cash-grabs.

3. If you're alone, don't even consider buying this game on sale. The community is gone. The game didn't make enough money to justify continued support and while pre-developed Season 2 content might release, it won't save the game and Season 3 will never arise since the game is horrendously under water.

4. Finally, I spent time with my friend replaying Hell or High Water, for almost 40 hours. It is by far the most efficient map, with rush finishes amounting to only about 18 minutes and providing a host of weapon and mod drops. Additionally, the campaign is pretty simple, even on higher difficulties. The map has a nice combination of scavanging, stealthing, gunplay, staged in residential districts, abandoned buildings, storefronts and the like. Hell or High Water is what kept me and my friend in the game. The map is what ALL of Walking Dead should've been like, not the shameless switch-hunting stumbling in the dark of other maps or the final map Join or Die sniper fiesta.

**Addendum** I believe that Skybound and Starbreeze have initiated a public dispute to prevent Starbreeze from sinking any more time into the game, including providing the *promised* content that has yet to be released. This is a patent violation of Starbreeze's contract with its customers. False advertising. Additionally, the moderators in the steam forum are horrendously unprofessional and incompetent, taking it upon themselves to reward abusive posters while arbitrarily censoring others.

Avoid this scam.

4/10.

Overkill's Walking Dead is a profoundly flawed game that most zombie game fans should avoid for now. The game was supposedly created over a period of four years, by the developers of Payday 2, but instead the title feels like a very complex mod or early access game/beta. The game centers on five survivors that live within the District of Columbia. Each character has a unique set of abilities and weapon bonuses. Heather/Reina is a scout and utilizes the crossbow to perform silent mid-range kills. Her main power is the smoke grenade, which, in theory, provides cover and slows enemies. Grant is the long-range sniper specialist and uses the quarter staff to fantastic melee effect. His power is the molotov which lights tons of enemies. Maya is the support class and utilizes SMGs, which are lousy, inaccurate messes in the game. Her power however is the overwhelmingly valuable medbag. Finally, Aidan is the tank and utilizes the baseball bat, silenced shotguns and his power is the poor flashbang. Now that we've got all the classes out of the way, let's underscore that none of this matters since the weapon bonuses each class gets for the weapons are absolutely worthless. I leveled Reina, the crossbowman, with sniper rifles, forgoing the bonuses and succeeded marvelously. That's because sniper rifles are by far the most powerful ranged weapons in the game. In melee, the quarterstaff, the machete and ice axe are king and every other melee is a poor shadow, doing less damage and taking a higher equivalent weapon level to perform one-hit kills. The gameplay is deeply flawed, relying on horde wave missions for 33% of the total game. The AI is brutally attrocious. While the zombies react brilliantly to sound, they also see you at times, regardless of how well you're hidden. That itself could be forgiven if the human AI worked well but instead Overkill provided them with telescopic laser vision in order to compensate for their brutally stupid "intelligence". AI can't flank. They don't navigate through weapon fire properly. They often shoot you while looking away from you. Sneaking is hit or miss. They move in janky bouts of super speed or brutal clumsiness and Overkill blessed their snipers with super invincibility. In the final levels of the game, you'll face dozens of snipers wearing dorky football helmets that absorb up to 2 sniper rounds before you are even allowed to score a headshot, even if you aim for the exposed areas of the face. The storyline focusing on the characters is non-existent and once one of the four main characters dies on mission 4, you're left nonplussed since you never learned anything about any of the characters. The entire game plot amounts to: Attacked by the family. Repel a zombie horde. Repel the family attack. Oh noes, they stole our water purifier. Get it back! Steal one of their radios. Steal their boss. Whoops, the Famliy is actually not as bad as the Brigade, another, different interchangeable antagonist. Attacked by the Brigade. Flee your base. Stumble like idiots in the sewer hitting a bunch of levers to open a door. Steal medical supplies. Assassinate some thugs. Steal some supplies from thugs. Liberate some survivors. Attacked by the Brigade again. Kill their second in command, Hurst, who has 6 lines in the whole game. The end. That's it. That's the game. And if you succeed in each mission, the game can be completed in 10 story-bereft hours. Don't expect to care about the characters. There's almost zero characterization. All of this could be forgiven if the game actually *ran* properly. It is a disaster. The update system is absolute trash. I pre-downloaded the 19.3 GB game the day before the release. On release day, they disseminated a 125 MB patch. No problem, as I have a 65 Mb/s connection right? Wrong. Downloading, unpacking and installing that update took over an HOUR. And each subsequent update takes crazy amounts of time. Some updates take as much as 30 minutes. None take less than 10, despite being 25 MB in size. The game loads poorly, even on my SSD with 32 GB of RAM. Expect to see the same stupid Red-Zombie skull splash screen. Out of my 75 hours of play time, I'm not kidding when I say that at *least* one hour of that time was spent staring at the screen. The game looks good at high settings but doesn't look better than Dying Light despite needing higher system requirements. The network code is abject vomit. If any player joins a game in L4D 2 or CoD or Battlefield, you feel nary a thing. Here the game hitches and seizes with a fraction of the playerbase, often ruining progress through a difficult area of the mission. Did you traverse into a new zone of the map? More seizing occurs. And I'm not talking about a minor dip for a few seconds. I'm talking about 5-10 fps for a good 5-10 seconds, while surrounded by brutally difficult walkers. Just as bad is the janky hitboxes where headshots miss through phantom heads or where a solid strike to the head is ignored as the zombies grasp you anyways. If zombies hit maximum 3-Dot panic level, they become practically untennable but since the game has no server browser and relies on blind matchmaking, expect to have a plethora of idiots ruining your careful 30-50 minutes of stealthing on a whim or through sheer, stupendous idiocy. Luckily, I had a friend playing with me and we were able to clutch our way through a series of these situations but I sympathize with loner players that lack that advantage since most missions, on the easiest difficulty, are practically impossible on solo. The game also has a bogus camp-upgrading/happiness mechanic that has almost no legitimate effect on your own experience in the missions. Oh and you can find an NPC called a Wanderer and feed him a lot of rare, valuable and amazing weapons and items to get....trash that's weaker than what you have. All in all, Walking Dead confirms four things for me: 1. This game is 2 weeks old and already long dead. The total playerbase has never exceeded 15000 players. Let me repeat that fact. The playerbase has never exceeded 15000 players. The current playerbase fluctuates between 1000 and 4000 max players a scant TWO weeks later. The game is dead and has far too many technical issues to be salvaged. 2. I'm never buying another Overkill game. Between Payday 2 and this crapshow, I'm done spending 60 USD on unfinished cash-grabs. 3. If you're alone, don't even consider buying this game on sale. The community is gone. The game didn't make enough money to justify continued support and while pre-developed Season 2 content might release, it won't save the game and Season 3 will never arise since the game is horrendously under water. 4. Finally, I spent time with my friend replaying Hell or High Water, for almost 40 hours. It is by far the most efficient map, with rush finishes amounting to only about 18 minutes and providing a host of weapon and mod drops. Additionally, the campaign is pretty simple, even on higher difficulties. The map has a nice combination of scavanging, stealthing, gunplay, staged in residential districts, abandoned buildings, storefronts and the like. Hell or High Water is what kept me and my friend in the game. The map is what ALL of Walking Dead should've been like, not the shameless switch-hunting stumbling in the dark of other maps or the final map Join or Die sniper fiesta. **Addendum** I believe that Skybound and Starbreeze have initiated a public dispute to prevent Starbreeze from sinking any more time into the game, including providing the *promised* content that has yet to be released. This is a patent violation of Starbreeze's contract with its customers. False advertising. Additionally, the moderators in the steam forum are horrendously unprofessional and incompetent, taking it upon themselves to reward abusive posters while arbitrarily censoring others. Avoid this scam. 4/10.