The Walking Dead: Destinies review
By Amy McCrindle
The Walking Dead: Destinies is the 6th instalment of Walking Dead games with a new studio taking on the challenge this time around after Telltale Games shut down
The Walking Dead franchise has something of a bad reputation when it comes to video game adaptations. From cheap mobile games to unfinished multiplayer shooters, to whatever Survival Instinct was supposed to be, the IP has long struggled in making any sort of impact within the gaming sphere outside of Telltale’s award-winning point and click adventure title. The Walking Dead: Destines takes inspiration from Telltale’s cult hit, throwing players into the story of the television show and allowing them to take control of the narrative through choices that will change the outcome of the story. It’s an interesting concept that developer Flux Games and publisher GameMill completely fail to deliver on.
The first few minutes of Destines gave me a solid idea of what I was in for. After navigating the laggy start up screen, the game throws the player straight into the heart of the story as Deputy Rick Grimes awakens from a coma in an abandoned hospital. The first task was to push the gurney stretcher blocking the door of Rick’s room out of the way so that he could escape – something I was unable to do as the button input wasn’t registering. Reloading the game fixed this issue but created an entirely new one: there was no sound except for The Walking Dead theme song playing on loop.
The game quickly introduces the player to walkers and the game’s primary stealth mechanics. Sneaking around and waiting for the right moment to slide from cover to cover is completely pointless, however, as the walker AI doesn’t register the player unless they stand still directly in front of them. As Rick strolled past the zombie threat, a tutorial popped up in the corner of the screen encouraging me to “Roll my way through walkers”. A basic combat tutorial came shortly after, followed by Rick heading to the city of Atlanta in search of his wife and son. He was quickly surrounded by a horde of walkers and the player is thrown into what is supposed to be another longwinded stealth segment, but this can be entirely avoided by having Rick roly-poly his way through the undead crowd as the dodge roll makes him invulnerable.
It’s at this point that decision making comes into play. In Destinies, these are called Defining Choices and can lead to the story and the fates of characters changing. They can also be the catalyst for Group Conflicts which require the player to ease tensions between group members after certain Defining Choices are made. On paper it sounds in-depth and thought out but it’s disappointingly superficial.
Two group members - Merle and T-Dog - were having an intense argument on a roof over the former’s cocaine addiction and love of shooting guns not mixing well in the zombie apocalypse. Instead of Rick handcuffing Merle to a pipe like he does in the show, I made the Defining Choice to defuse the situation. This led to a static PowerPoint-esque ‘cutscene’ where Merle had somehow got his hands on Rick’s cuffs and chained T-Dog to the rooftop pipe without anyone noticing. Once back at camp, a Group Conflict immediately kicked off between Merle and Dale with the latter accusing Merle of purposefully leaving T-Dog for dead. The player is then asked who they want to side with.
I pre-emptively assumed that whatever choice I made would affect Rick’s relationship both positively and negatively with other characters. I expected too much of this game, however, because after backing Dale up, nothing happened. There was no change in how he or Merle behaved around Rick. Merle didn’t have anything to say about it, Daryl had no thoughts on Rick throwing his brother under the bus, nobody in the group cared.
Ignoring the bugs, monotonous gameplay loop, how bad it looks, and it’s all in all terribleness, The Walking Dead: Destinies biggest problem is that the story changing decisions – the whole purpose of this game’s existence beyond being an attempt at a quick cash grab – don’t really change anything beyond the surface level.
If you choose to have Shane kill Rick at the end of season 2, he becomes the leader of the group. But nothing really changes beyond playing as Shane instead of Rick. The group still goes to the prison, they still end up overrun by walkers, which leads to Lori’s death, they still end up in a conflict with the Governor, and they still have an all-out war by the midway point of season 4. T-Dog getting cuffed leads to him taking on Merle’s show role as the Governor’s righthand man. Not putting down the Governor’s undead daughter leads to him joining the group and T-Dog taking up the mantle of the main villain. Again, I thought that this change might lead to something new and interesting, but it didn’t. T-Dog Governor does the exact same things as the regular TV show Governor. He wants revenge on Rick (even if Rick is no longer alive in your playthrough), he’ll roll up to the prison in a tank with a small army, and he’ll kill a member of the group with a katana.
The Walking Dead: Destinies lacks any substance, and it is difficult to put into words just how awful it is. It’s a misery to slog through due to its horrible gameplay loop, bullet sponge zombies that’ll take multiple shots to the head before they go down, the same tanky zombie boss fight thrown into every second mission, and auto lock-on guns that are near impossible to manually aim even with assistance turned off.
Unlike Telltale’s The Walking Dead, there are no consequences to your actions. For the most part, everything plays out exactly the same way as in the show, with only the odd role being switched here and there. Some of the decisions you can make in this game should lead to massive story shake-ups, but the characters and narrative do not acknowledge them in any way, which makes the entire thing completely pointless.