The Walking Dead: Michonne

Okay so I had actively put off playing any of the new Walking Dead Tell Tale games for a while, mainly because the storylines and music were depressing and the main characters were just really bad at surviving. As nice as Clementine is, she’s not going to go around beheading zombies left right and centre is she. Michonne goes some way towards rectifying this. The reason I decided to get on this now was because it was on sale for Halloween, along with about ten others I won’t play for three years.

I don’t profess to know anything about the comics so I did a little research before writing this review. She is a character from both the comics and the TV series but I’ve not kept up with the TV series at all. The game is supposed to explore a period of time in the series where she is absent from the main cast. The story in the game sees her meet up with a guy named Pete who takes her on a ship to sea and she makes some other friends.

Interestingly she is quite a cold character so staying silent through the whole three episodes of the game feels like a valid option. In addition to this as I mentioned above, she is quite handy with a machete too and the game has a lot of quick time events where you slice up zombies real nice. These are also more forgiving in terms of the time you have to avoid death - probably due to the fact there are so many more of them than normal. It makes sense in terms of the character you are controlling though.

The decision making, supposedly the major plus point of the series, is again suspect here and I did a little bit more research to avoid additional playthroughs after a decision I made resulted in an outcome I didn’t like. Essentially, none of your choices mean anything to end outcome. If you make a decision not to do something, the same outcome will happen later in a different way. It defeats the point of having choices in these games if those choices don’t actually mean anything. I realised this at the beginning of episode three so stopped caring about my decisions from this point onwards.

The other thing about the decisions is that they often boil down to which character you want to like you more. There are outcomes that are often a split path and there doesn’t appear to be a way to get everyone to agree or like your choices. On the flip side, if you want to be a total asshole, it’s probably only possible to get a handful of characters to hate you. It’s not real life so at least allowing the player the ability to ‘win’ once in a while would be nice.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 21 Achievements

With most TellTale games, there’s not a lot to say here. Complete the game will get you all of them across the three episodes. I still don’t consider the extra episodes to be DLC. They are part of the main game and the cost of the game should be considered the price of all three episodes. So...

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Walking Dead: Michonne is one of the better TellTale Walking Dead games but the lack of real choice is still a massive bug bear of mine. Also when are we going to be able to play as Rick Grimes? That would be a major seller for me and most others, I’m sure.