The Walking Dead - A New Frontier

A note before reading – the game is over a year old so expect this review to contain information that could be considered spoilers. Read on at your own risk.

The latest instalment of the current guise of The Walking Dead franchise was another Halloween purchase that I pushed up my playlist due to it’s easy completion status. However, what I failed to recognise again is how much of a drag these games are to get through.

A New Frontier sees you take control of Javier Garcia – a guy I actually thought was called Harvey for the first few hours of the game – as you are given the backstory of his initial survival before being brought up to the current timeline which is a few months after the end of season 2.

The first thing that you can do is import your decisions from the previous seasons if you have played them. As the story develops, in true Telltale style, any decisions you previously made are immediately made redundant through flashback scenes. The game follows this course through the remainder of the game too. All decisions can be summed by asking the question, ‘do you want John to die now, or later?’ He is going to die, you cannot stop it from happening but at least the game presents you with a choice in the matter.

Another notable thing about the in-game decisions is that some of them don’t even impact how the other characters react to you. The prime example of this is Tripp. When I played, I went behind his back to get what I wanted faster and then later I shot at some cunts who were trying to kill me which caused them to burn his town to the ground. And he still acts like your best friend. I know that the guys who burned the town down would have done it anyway but the way I played, Tripp should have blamed me.

This kind of behaviour continues throughout the whole game to the point where characters will change their opinion of you at the flip of a switch and go from liking you to totally hating you and it feels very much like this happens because it has to happen for the story Telltale want to tell.

I gave up caring about the outcomes the characters could face about half way through and instead of trying to keep everyone happy, I just split between doing what Clementine and Kate wanted the whole time and screw everyone else. I have to say, it made the game more fun not caring!

A New Frontier suffers from the same game play issues as its predecessors with slow load times and sometimes glitchy and patchy graphics. In addition to this, the music continues the trend of being depressing throughout, to the point where I couldn’t play it for a prolonged amount of time and had to watch some uplifting TV to get over it.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

There are six achievements for each episode and it’s another case of just completing the game in order to get them all. The only hard bit is trying not to fall asleep when you actually have to take control of Javier and move him around to look at various bits of garbage.

Downloadable Content – N/A

So apparently there is a final season on the way but Telltale have decided to release the entire current collection again which can be bought for a mere £49.99. Not only does this make no sense to do it for an incomplete collection, but it’s a total rip off at that price – but probably examples the willingness of people to pay £4 per episode because if you haven’t played the games and want to play them, £49.99 is probably cheaper than buying them all individually. I won’t be buying it though.

I will play the final season to see how it pans out but to be honest, I will be glad to see the back of the The Walking Dead series. I can’t help but feel that the series would have been much more enjoyable if it wasn’t sold as ‘your choices matter.’ Because they don’t.