Now Playing: The Walking Dead: The Final Season

It’s kind of amazing that The Walking Dead: The Final Season even exists. It’s a game that essentially got canned mid-way through development and half way through its episodic release. That it got completed at all is thanks to the passionate developers who were determined to finish what they’d started. That’s why I don’t really want to be too hard on it. That said, I can’t say I agree with the ‘overwhelmingly positive’ Steam reviews because, to be frank, The Walking Dead: TFS isn’t actually a very good game.

The story picks up some time following the events of A New Frontier and sees Clementine and AJ find refuge in an old school for troubled youths. There’s only 4 episodes to play, as opposed to the usual 5 of previous ‘seasons’ but that’s not surprising given the development issues. And I can’t say it feels like the game got cut short – it tells its story and it tells it well in the time that it has. If all you care about is seeing how Clementine’s story ends, then I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

But here’s the thing – there’s not much of a ‘game’ here at all. Most of your time ‘playing’ TFS will be sitting back watching cut-scenes. Every so often Clementine will stop moving and you’ll realise you’re back in control, but some of these ‘gameplay’ sections last only a few moments as you move her forward a few steps and . . . the next 5 minute cut-scene triggers. Honestly, they could have just cut the pointless ‘gameplay’ sections entirely and just made it a full animated movie with dialogue options because that’s all it really is.

There’s an attempt to make combat against walkers more engaging but it’s complete shit because it just involves running back and forth to create some space before killing them one at a time. If you let one get too close to you they lock on like a heat seeking missile and can magically teleport behind you, instantly killing Clementine and forcing you to restart the section from scratch. It’s not hard, just irritating.

There’s no way in which the gameplay directs the flow of the story. Miss a QTE? You either insta-die and have to re-do it, or . . . it turns out it didn’t matter anyway. A great example of this is in the final episode where a character is fending off a walker and Clementine has a bow lined up to save them. The game puts you in charge of taking the shot but I decided not to, just to see what would happen. After nearly a full minute of awkward struggling and Clementine just standing there watching, the character just kicked the walker off themselves because . . .

Choices, both in gameplay and dialogue, don’t count for shit. I guess that’s kind of been the case throughout this entire series but it feels even worse here and it’s particularly disappointing given that this is the last season. This was a chance to really give us a lot more variation to the story through our dialogue choices and our actions in gameplay – especially at the end. When some dialogue ‘choices’ result in an insta-death, what’s the point of them? You’re just forced to go back and pick the ‘right’ option anyway.

The game sets itself up to mirror the first, with Clementine in the role of Lee and AJ in the role of Clementine. It’s a neat idea – you’re teaching AJ and shaping who he will become through your words and actions. And if this led to a variety of possible outcomes – such as AJ dying saving Clementine, or Clementine dying saving AJ, or both surviving but at a cost or . . . there’s so much more they could have done given that this was the last season and there’s no need to worry about any kind of ‘canon’ ending to take forward into another game. Instead, there’s only one ending for both AJ and Clementine regardless of your choices or actions.

Do some characters live or die depending upon your choices? Sure, but not in any ways that actually result in a different sequence of events or overall outcome. And frankly, the new characters really aren’t that interesting so I can’t say I really cared that much about who survived and who didn’t.

Overall, I’m glad I played The Final Season but that’s only really because I love Clementine as a character and I wanted to see how her story ends. From a ‘game’ point of view, The Final Season isn’t good at all but given the development troubles, I have to cut it some slack. If you enjoyed the other Walking Dead games then this worth getting on sale, but don’t set your expectations very high and be aware that you’re mostly just going to be sitting back, watching the ride.

5/10