What’s exciting about developer Terminal Reality’s The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct are the same things that are exciting about developer Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead: The Game – choice and consequence. As you make your way through biter-infested towns and across lonesome highways, you’re going to come across survivors and forks in the road. Based on the car you’re in, you won’t be able to pick up every drifter; you need to decide who lives and dies. Once you pick a path for the group, there’s no going back. While you and I will probably all arrive at similar (if not the same) endings, our path to the credits could be very different. That’s what a Walking Dead video game is all about.
If you’re a bit confused, The Walking Dead: The Game is based on the comics and out right now as both a downloadable title and a standalone disc. An adventure game, it made IGN’s short list for Game of the Year and won a lot of other awards on the site. Meanwhile, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is a first-person shooter coming in 2013. Whereas the adventure game was based on the comics, the first-person shooter is based on the AMC TV show.
Clearly, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct has its work cut out for itself.
Meet the herd.
The story casts us as Daryl Dixon (the crossbow-packing badass actor Norman Reedus plays on Sundays and in this game) during the start of the outbreak – the time when Rick Grimes is in a coma. Alongside his racist and rowdy brother Merle Dixon (also played by his TV show counterpart Michael Rooker), Daryl roams Georgia looking to last another day – and of course silently stab walkers in the head.
That’s the thing: The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct doesn’t play like Call of Duty, a concern the vocal minority in the comments below had when Activision announced that it was publishing the game. Watching a hands-off demo, the running and gunning was nearly nonexistent until the town Daryl and Merle were in literally was exploding thanks to a fireworks distraction the boys rigged.
Mallrats' Michael Rooker returns.
Survival Instinct is about, well, surviving. You need to peek around dumpsters to see what you’re coming up against, hurl glass bottles you’ve collected to distract the herd, and keep the running to a minimum so you don’t have sweat roll down your FPS screen and give off that smell walkers can’t resist. Yes, there’s shooting and stabbing and we even find out how Daryl comes across his trademark crossbow, but Terminal Reality is set on bringing the rules of the show to the game; three walkers should scare you.
But again, it’s not the stealth stabs to walker heads or the fact that biters are attracted to your gunfire that’s exciting in The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. As you come across people in need of help – people that could become fellow group members – you get to start taking inventory of your squad. See, once you get someone in your group, you can send them out on missions while you tackle the FPS mission at hand. So before you leave camp for your level, you can assign Person X to run out and get gas. But do you want to give him or her a weapon from your inventory or a sports drink (health in the game)? There’s no guarantee this person is coming back and these are supplies your sacrificing for your own trip into the unknown. Would a survivor you passed over on the road have a better chance at providing for the group?
Smile, you son of a...
There’s an Oregon Trail element to all of this. Missions are split into two groups – Waypoint Missions where we have to pick if we’re going to Point A or Point B (let’s say a sheriff’s station or a camp) and Road Events such as clearing a congested highway or wasting the gas to go the long way around the obstruction. You need to gather supplies from these quests. You can run out of gas on the highway, and then the game ends (while giving you the chance to restart from a checkpoint). Scavenging and putting yourself at risk are keys to surviving.
All of that is cool, but we won’t know how it all comes together until Terminal Reality and Activison give us the chance to play The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. Right now, I’m into what they’re saying, but seeing the game in action, the level itself did seem a bit linear. Of course, Daryl could’ve gone for a different mission I suppose, and there are the varied paths of the title. Still, the biggest hurdle for me were the graphics. Granted, this game isn’t coming until next year sometime, but headshots were causing noggins to disappear and the game didn’t look too stellar overall. It’s totally serviceable, but it’s not something that screams HD era at the moment.
Still, The Walking Dead is more than just pretty visuals. Reedus and Rooker both sound great, multiple paths are always a good thing, and did I mention the choice and consequences? Look for more updates on The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct as we get closer to whenever the hell it’s coming out in 2013.
Greg is the executive editor of IGN PlayStation, cohost of Podcast Beyond and host of Up at Noon. Follow IGN on Twitter, and keep track of Greg's shenanigans on IGN and Twitter. Beyond!
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