Spooky season kicks off with The Walking Dead Onslaught, but unfortunately like the show it has some good ideas but fails to excel at any of them, delivering instead mindless popcorn action.
The Walking Dead Onslaught
Developer: Survios
Price: $29.99
Platform: PC VR/PSVR
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
I am, admittedly, not the biggest Walking Dead fan. I bounced off the series quite early and only stayed with it as long as I did out of a stubborn hope that it’d get better. It didn’t. You can imagine my frustrations when The Walking Dead Onslaught takes the worst aspect of the series and bases its entire campaign around it: Daryl. As a character, Daryl sucks. Always did, and always will because his “character” is the insufferable loner trope which is a trait that gets worse the longer the character stays around. I cannot begin to describe the amount of groaning I did whenever he opened his mouth in the game and I’m currently scheduling a doctor’s appointment for the straining caused from copious eye-rolling.
The game opens with you (Rick) finding Daryl after he’d been missing for some time. Rick, justifiably, wants to know where this borderline neanderthal has been and each conversation amounts to Daryl (in his trademark no personality delivery) muttering about needing to save “some girl” and how Rick’s wasting time wanting to hear this story when they should be looking for the girl. The missions themselves are Daryl flashbacks to those days he’s out looking for this person and his inner-monologuing is the absolute cringiest shit ever. It doesn’t help that each mission has you mindlessly killing zombies through linear zones while another person occasionally radios you to give slightly less monotone dialog. Thankfully (?), the campaign is just a measly seven missions that are unlocked as you increase the size of your community, which feels a bit like padding so you don’t immediately breeze through what would be two hours of content.
When you’re not searching through settings to mute the dialog in the campaign, you’ll be going on supply runs to build up the town of Alexandria. The Walking Dead Onslaught thrusts you into this barren town and tasks you with bringing it back to life by completing supply runs to find new survivors who will then unlock a (small) handful of structures you can build that will outfit you with various upgrades. The town hall for example once built will give you a 20% health increase, which goes up with each upgrade it receives.
You’ll find supplies to upgrade your town (or weapons) when you go on supply runs through the mission board Michonne runs. From here you’ll select from a variety of mission types, but they all amount to “get to the evac spot and kill everything in your way”. To encourage you to always keep moving, the game introduces an always creeping red wall of walkers, so the goal is to get in and get out with whatever you can. Despite having a handful of environmental locations (each with a set amount of missions in them), many indoor locations are heavily reused, which is to its benefit and detriment. On one hand, it’s pretty helpful to bust your way into a door and go “oh it’s the same laundromat area from the previous zone, I know how to navigate this and where the loot spawn locations are”. But on the other hand, it is kind of bummer seeing these same interiors over and over as your grind to get materials. Now your longevity with this game will determine heavily in how much you enjoy mindlessly killing zombies during these supply runs because once you finish the brisk campaign, there’s not really anything left to do except grinding out those supply runs to upgrade your town or weapons for the sake of upgrading them.
The Walking Dead Onslaught is, if you didn’t know, a VR game and on that front, it’s perfectly fine. The game does kind of break my VR rule of not having any sort of interactivity with the environment, but it brings the choking that Saints & Sinners did and that’s always fun. I like zombie games that let me let loose and have some fun, which this game does albeit with a bit *too* mindless of behavior for my tastes as it treads into repetitive territory here. The main issue with Onslaught however stems from the fact that this clearly isn’t intentional.
The game is based on the series which is *super serious stuff*. However, hampering the overall experience is a serious lack of heft to the combat. There’s absolutely *zero* weight to the weapons in the game, with many lacking any sort of serious punch to them. This then leads you doing things like comically swinging a massive battle-axe around with one hand like it weighs nothing. These moments just suffocate any tension that may have been there, with the only moments of dread being the ever-encroaching wall of walkers when on a supply run but even then that’ll just quickly become a minor annoyance as you effortlessly stab your way through those missions not paying the wall any mind.
Unlike the absolutely phenomenal Saints & Sinners from earlier this year, there’s a disappointing lack of a “crunch” to the combat. Besides weapons feeling light, it doesn’t even feel good when you make an impact with a weapon. The baseball bats and wrenches in particular just felt like toys as I’d swing hard on a zombie’s head multiple times to no avail. Even the guns lack a certain oomph to them, as some pistols early on take 4-5 shots to the head to put a zombie down. You’ll quickly drop the guns (and pretty much every other weapon) to exclusively use the knife. That thing stabs into a zombie’s head for instant death and comes back out insanely smooth; I’d regularly rush into crowds of zombies just pulling off rapid head stabs and I’d even do this on the veteran difficulty. That weapon turned what should be a tense experience into a cakewalk, and the situation is exasperated once you acquire the battle-axe or katana which offers the same effect but with a greater reach.
It’s really hard not to, and I always hate doing this, but Onslaught really feels like it’d have been a better-received game had Saints & Sinners not come out earlier this year and beat it to the punch on literally every mechanic it’s trying to do. The story is more engaging, the VR elements more immersive, the combat feels super satisfying with some impressive dismemberment, and the run-based survival/crafting loop is better realized. Onslaught on the other hand feels like a testing bed for the things Saints & Sinners succeeded on… back in January.
The Final Word
The Walking Dead Onslaught isn’t a bad game per say, I’m sure fans of the series will find some fun in it, it’s just wholly disappointing when compared to the recently released Saints & Sinners.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
