‘The Walking Dead’ Just Released A Shocking, Hilariously Bad Game

The Walking Dead: Destinies

Flux

I remember hearing about The Walking Dead: Destinies, a game with the concept that you could alter major events in TWD history and see how the story plays out, like what if Shane killed Rick instead of the other way around.

However, I was skeptical of who was making it, Flux Games, a studio I’d never heard of who has apparently made two Cobra Kai games I have also never heard of, along with some other random titles. It’s published by the aptly named “GameMill” Entertainment. But while I wasn’t holding out much hope, the end result is just…hilariously terrible, it turns out.

That includes both combat, which is clunky and extremely goofy, and cutscenes which have the character models simply standing in place, a worse version of static Redfall cutscenes, somehow. It almost looks like the game has just glitched:

Then, here is the promised “boss battle” Rick versus Shane fight that can alter the events of the show. It features Rick taking no less than about two dozen shotgun shells straight to the face before Shane finally takes him down. I get that boss battles against unarmored human enemies can be hard to script, but this is just hilarious to watch unfold:

I remain deeply sad that The Walking Dead never got a proper, AAA budgeted open world game that could channel other titles like Fallout or The Division. Built up communities, defend against zombies and raiders and cannibals and what not.

We did squeeze out a few good games from the series. Telltale’s Walking Dead story games, and The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is actually a pretty solid VR game, kind of a rarity. That’s all well and good but I feel like there was so much potential here, specifically when the series was at its peak some years back, that was never realized, and besides those two, there have been plenty of bad attempts given to studios that should never have been touching the IP. Now, we can add The Walking Dead: Destinies to this list, which genuinely looks like it was made in 2011.

The game was released yesterday on some platforms, it seems, but does not have any reviews at all on Metacritic from what I can see. I assume there were not review codes for it, and now that it’s out, I do wonder how many critics will bother with it. It’s actually out on really all platforms, current and last gen Xbox and PlayStation, plus PC. But it is a miss on a level that cements how badly this IP has been mishandled over the years in the gaming space, with just a couple exceptions. Give this to a big, talented studio, please! It can still do well!

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.