Garbage Games: The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct

When you live your life under an avalanche of Steam games, it’s not too surprising you end up having to wade through piles of dross to get to the good stuff. For the past decade, I’ve waded through the worst of Steam in order to play the quality games I actually own. Finally though, after years of paying for this trash to sit unused in my library, I’ve finally found a use for it. An article series, dedicated to the absolute worst games that I own.

Trawling through, I settled on the perfect opening game. A game that, at one point in my innocent little life I was very excited for, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. I was a naive child at the time, one who hadn’t been burned by corporations cashing in on high-profile franchises. That was about to change.

The game itself had it’s warning signs to anyone with more than five brain cells, I imagine. Yet, 19 year old me just couldn’t resist the charm of Walking Dead content. It was published by Activision, and we can trust them right? Turns out my confidence was misplaced and, to the surprise of no one but me, a first-person shooter by the studio most famous for Star Wars Kinect was an absolute shambles. I mean, just look at this title screen:

For the unsure, that is Norman Reedus splashed over the front, looking like he’s wearing a decomposed headcrab for a hat. The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is set before the show, focusing on Darryl as he looks for his missing brother. It’s all the usual stuff at this point. Bonus content for a television show that doesn’t really add anything of significant note. Either way, I smash the New Game button and away we go.

Admittedly, the image I’ve pasted above feels like I’ve committed a visual crime against everyone reading. Despite being impaired by colour-blindness, I feel confident in saying The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct contains a total of about five colours in any given scene. With three those being varying shades of dull grey. Not to mention those trees in the background. That’s not image compression, they’re just that blurry in game. You can’t even improve it with the graphic settings, because running the game in 1080p looks like this:

It’s an abomination. Apparently I got seven hours into this game eight years ago, and I imagine I wasn’t running it in 1080p at the time. Nevertheless, I shall push on through these hideous trees, or what I’ve assumed to be trees, and venture into the gameplay.

Which was a mistake. A mistake anyone reading probably could have warned me about. I think The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is supposed to be a stealth-heavy game. Based purely on the game's emphasis on telling me about it. It’s got all the goodies you’d expect an early 2010’s stealth game to have. Crouch to remain undetected, turn off your flashlight, throw bottles to distract zombies, all the usual stuff. To the surprise of no one, none of that stuff actually works at any point. Crouching increases your detection range by about a meter, zombies have less interest in the bottle smashing sound than I do for the next Coldplay album, and nothing could care less about the flashlight raves I was creating.

 

So how do you deal with these zombies? Well, your guns are limited, stealth is broken, so those two options are out. Running isn’t ideal, because our friend Darryl apparently smokes 100 cigarettes a day which has drained his lung capacity over the years. After strafing around for a bit to prevent being nibbled on, I found myself a lead pipe and concocted an idea for the ages. I leaped onto the roof of a nearby car, swinging wildly at the undead below till my heart's content. Who needs stealth and guns when you have a fresh block of cheese?

One of my favourite aspects of The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is how no two things ever seem to have the same framerate. You’ll have some smoke to your side running at 20, you’ll have a police officer in front of you running at 30. It’s an impressive inconsistency that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

This game was launched off the back of The Walking Dead Series by TellTale games. Warning signs were clear to pretty much everyone, but that didn’t prevent people from having hope. Going back through my Steam purchase history, this was a £29.99 purchase on release day. That was a full price game back then for those who may have forgotten. 30 quid for a barebones game that feels like the devs wanted that probably this would be a Kinect spin-off.

Going back, I was surprised to remember all the smaller mechanics the game tried to implement. Recruiting survivors, sending them scavenging. There were ideas on show that proved Survival Instinct was supposed to be more than a quick money maker. At had all that foundations to become a solid survival game. Sadly, none of it blooms into anything worth playing.

Hideous visuals, laughable AI and gameplay that wouldn’t have felt out of place in the early 2000’s would ultimately condemn The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct to the trash. An insane price tag didn’t help and even some eight years after first being disappointed by it, I went in with an open mind. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I remembered? It was, it was much worse than I remembered. Ultimately, it’s a game that was forced out too soon so Activison could make money. That, or it was money laundering.