We all know the story of AMC's ultra-popular TV series (based on Robert Kirkman's best-selling comic book series). Sheriff Rick Grimes wakes up from a coma to discover that the world has ended. A deadly virus has paralysed the entire United States and the living dead patrol the empty, bombed-out streets. To survive, Rick must track down his old police colleague Shane to join forces and get some kind of grip on an intangible situation. Together they must get Rick's wife Lori and son Carl to safety and then begin to devise a plan to barricade themselves in the nearby Atlanta prison. Before that, however, it is revealed that best friend Shane has been fooling around with his wife Lori, who is now pregnant with his child, all while old grumpy Rick has been dozing in his coma and lost track of the whole doomsday process. Great drama ensues and people have to be killed, in addition to the hundreds of walkers with their slimy limbs trying to chew the overworked brains of the surviving heroes, of course. Death, drama, bad dialogue, death and more drama is what is offered or has been offered in all the years the TV series has been running.
With the newly released licensed game The Walking Dead: Destinies, South American game studio Flux Games (Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga) and publisher GameMill Entertainment (Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Nerf Legends) want to give you, the player, the chance to partially rewrite the story of The Walking Dead. You will have the opportunity to change the fate of Shane, Rick, Dale, Glenn, Lori and several others by making some important choices along the way. Well, that's how it works in theory - at least. On paper too, obviously. Because that's how this game has been marketed. "Choose your own destiny". Which sounds good. Comprehensive. Exciting. Different. Unfortunately, though, that doesn't work noticeably better than the basic game mechanics here, which border on abominable.
The game begins just as the series once did. Rick crawls out of the polygon-poor hospital bed and takes his first stumbling steps towards the exit, where blood and dead bodies are gathered in a small low-resolution pile. Jump! After that he stands there, on the motorway in the middle of Atlanta wearing his freshly ironed sheriff's clothes, and the zombie slaughter can begin. Many really stupid and horribly ugly animated "Walkers" must be beaten to death with baseball bats and Rick must reach the city centre, where he intends to climb onto the armoured car to escape certain death. Jump! You are now playing as Glenn. Without warning. The same tired Walkers must be killed with the same tired tools, and when not pounding light grey zombie skulls, stealth is on the menu.
The Walking Dead: Destinies is an outright copy of The Last of Us with all that entails. Sometimes the enemies are so deadly that it's impossible to fight your way through, while other times it's perfectly fine. You'll never know what makes one fight kill you as a player or offer the simplest level of challenge in gaming history. It just is, and you are simply forced to test (and die) to get the answer. Sometimes there are stealth requirements and you can activate the exact same "presence" feature as in Naughty Dog's masterpiece, where the game world briefly goes black and white and, via a foggy noise, allows you to plan your stealth route to avoid "patrolling" zombies. They often walk two metres straight ahead, turn around and walk two metres in the other direction, then walk two metres in the direction they first walked and then turn around again. The sneaking is thus so brainlessly useless that it is hardly possible to do it without laughing.
In fact, everything is so bad that the laughs come thick and fast. The animation work looks like something went wrong and the developers "lost" frames along the way, while the game mechanics themselves are reminiscent of a bad mobile game that really wants nothing more than to be The Last of Us. The worst part is when the characters try to interact with each other in various dialogue sequences. It really doesn't make much sense. Rick, Dale, Shane and all the others look like they've been modelled out of puff pastry and every single proportion in every single face in this game is wrong. Rick's face looks an awful lot like a self-portrait done by someone with a 2.8 blood alcohol level or someone who just finished their high school exam with a final score of 0.1. It doesn't get any worse than this. Especially not for Playstation 5 in 2023.
I should probably write more about The Walking Dead: Destinies. Go into detail about how bad the graphics are (looks like a ten year old mobile game), how bad the sound, the game world or the boss fights are but I can't be bothered. If Flux Games can't even be bothered to model Rick Grimes so that he even resembles Andy Lincoln (but rather an intelligence-free wheat length in a hospital gown), I can't be bothered to detail their poor work here, either. Instead, the important thing for me is to warn you properly so that you don't end up paying for this horrible rubbish. Because this is, along with Skull Island: Rise of Kong and Lord of the Rings: Gollum, the worst game of the year. Shame on you!