The idea of a post-apocalyptic world always attracted me. Movies, magazines, stories, themes, aye had a lot of curiosity within theses, chiefly when talking about an end of the world with zombies and a lot of destruction. Every nerd one day had this dream and for sure spent a lot of time through the night playing Resident Evil and other related games.

Among the great variety of series and movies that went out about it, the one highly recommended at the time is The Walking Dead, displayed by AMCTV. Divided so far into 3 Seasons (4o Season forecast to start on February of 2013), the series brings a group of people that tries to survive inside a scenario taken by zombies due to worldwide infection. The seek for the cure and a shelter transforms the existence of those survivals into a daily fight to keep themselves alive. And, given by the success of the series, we couldn’t let out the game industry that made progress of the moment. It is possible to encounter a various number of Flash games based on the series or even with the same idea (before, during and after the release of The Walking Dead). The last best seen game was The Walking Dead: The Game, produced by TellTale Games.

Howsoever, we should back to the focal point of this text. The Walking Dead – Social Game – Beta Version.

On the last days, I had been playing this game, because I am a real fan of the series. Well, let’s see what I think about it. It is important to highlight that I am considering, so far, the Beta Version of the game, so I faithfully believe that some updates will be release soon and we will finally have a final and better version.

The game starts with a creation of your Avatar, which can interlard between clothes, skin color and face types. After, you have a small tutorial that teaches you the basic moves of the game as walk, hide, attack, etc. The game itself is divided into Missions and History Mode, where is possible to open new scenes and events of the series. The missions require an amount of energy to be played and it recharges 1 point ever other 3 minutes.

Unfortunately, the game is really repetitious and the missions, after a few time, ended getting a little bit boring, because consist on the same objective between restore water, food, medical supplies and/or clean an area of Walkers (or Bitters if you prefer). An amount of supplies is requires ever other time you want to play the History. Important to say that the texts and lines, despite of adapt the player to the environment, are repetitive and the characters always pull out the same thing.

Another interesting point is the mechanic of the game. Based on RPG and turns, the player can move the hero and hide over the scenario and/or attack the zombies scattered on the way. A hint: when a zombie spotted you, hiding can be less useful, because even when the Dangerous signal goes out of the screen, the dead body keeps walking towards you, so, in other words, hiding is almost useless unless you are very far away. (Maybe this is the real goal of the game, based on the happenings of the series…).

The experience given by the zombies is practically set, independent of a critical hit or even a tough shot (a shot given in a long range). The critical hit can be very useful to get points on the Story Mode but cannot be affected by the points distributed in the Shooting ability, so don`t waste your time (or points). Inside the Missions, it is worthless.

Talking about abilities, every other mission you can 1 point to spend among Vision, Stamina, Movement, Striking and Shooting. Each of them has specifications that can be used in game. Although, some of them doesn’t really need the distribution of points. Check it below:

Vision: It increases the vision of the scenario and it can help if you are using guns.

Stamina: It represents how tough you are and the bites you can handle inside the game.

Movement: Obviously, it means the movement inside the game so, the more points you spend on this, the higher are your chances to run for a zombie horde.

Striking: Is your timing of fight. During the game a Target will rise floating from one side to other of the zombies head. At the right moment, you need to press the mouse button to attack correctly. Still, don`t bother spending points on striking because these are only good to use better knifes and stuffs like it, but won`t change the swing of the Target.

Shooting: It follows the same rule of striking being only good to use better guns and won`t make you a better shooter.

Lastly, we can say that the game has nothing different for the other that we can find in the social networks and, if you really like The Walking Dead and the post-apocalyptic time like me, you will get yourself a few hours of fun; despite nothing special, being and application weak and doesn’t   instigates to be played for a long time. But, I still believe that we are dealing with a Beta-Version, and we will have a lot of new stuff coming along from the developers and producers of the game. (at least I want to believe so).

Originally posted in 04/12/2013.