It is so friggin easy to die, it's ridiculous. You take out every zombie in the yard. You have a pinch of life left and then a biter spawns behind you and takes a swing. You're dead, Daryl. I wouldn't be so upset, except the game has no save system. It rarely autosaves, and the autosave never happens when you want it. It's always right after you just used all your healing supplies. You just found a legendary katana! And then you died. Oh well. Legendary katana doesn't spawn. You have to play through twenty minutes of zombie killing all over again. (There is no katana in this game. I know.... it sucks.)
There is no reason to ever pick up gasoline, because if you take the highway to conserve gas, you will break down no matter what and have to find a radiator hose. It doesn't matter if your car was built in 2009. Every car in this world is a piece of crap that can't handle driving on the highway. If you take the back roads, no matter how much gas you picked up, you will run out and have to do a recon mission to find gas. The game always provides you with enough gas canisters in this mission, so it is way easier to just leave a free slot in your inventory and wait until the recon mission to gas up. Speaking of gasoline, you have to use up a slot to carry it in your inventory. That's inconsistent with realism. Just load the tank and dump those empty canisters. It makes you hold the gas in your inventory, when you could just PUT IT IN THE CAR'S GAS TANK THAT IS VERGING ON EMPTY. Sorry for the rant. The whole gasoline thing really drove me crazy.
Some other annoying factors, we're only a few days into the outbreak and everything in the world in ransacked. I got so frustrated with never having any health, I restarted my game just to play through the beginning without using any pots. You can search every grocery store in town and find nothing but empty glass bottles. It's such a waste of time searching every nook and cranny. While you're desperately searching for that healing sports drink, a zombie will grab you and it's game over.
The iconic crossbow used by Daryl Dixon in the show doesn't come into play until the end of the game. Jeez, that would have been useful. The game may have even been fun. Doesn't it make sense for Daryl to have his crossbow from the beginning? I mean, he WAS on a hunting trip when things went down. Whoever made the call on giving you the crossbow at the end of the game deserves to be put in a pit full of biters.
What I hated the most, more than the autosave, stopping for gas, breaking down or being punished for looting, was the horrible minigame you have to play each time a zombie grabs you. Ninety percent of combat in this game involves aiming a cursor at the zombie's face and executing right trigger. It's like trying to push two magnets together. The cursor does not want to be on the zombie's face at all. If you get overwhelmed by a herd, you must systematically stab each one of them in the face. You can face stab for five minutes, and then go down anyway because the zombies keep spawning. It's the most evil concept I've ever encountered in a video game. Their zombie faces still haunt my dreams.
That said, I'm not recommending that you stay away from this game. It tells a good story and has a few memorable lines. The anger and frustration that I went through was very similar to the emotions of the survivors on Walking Dead. At one point, my husband experienced a simulated mental break down. He just started punching a zombie over and over again, cursing at it endlessly until I told him that was enough. My husband and I, when we took turns playing, soon found our relationship in a similar state as Rick and Lori's.
He would chastise me for wasting ammo and I would get mad at him for criticizing my choices.
"Stop messing around! That's how you'll get yourself killed and then where will we be?"
"Your negativity makes it impossible to get through this!"
Once we realized we were Rick and Lori, we started laughing and making a joke of it.
"Don't ever challenge my authority in front of the group!"
"I wish Shane was alive instead of you!"
The game allows you to do a second playthrough with unlocked relics. I happened to get the silenced rifle and silenced handgun. With these, I actually had fun playing. Still, I mailed it right on back to Gamefly. If I played video games to experience the true hardship of the apocalypse, I wouldn't be playing video games. I would join the red cross or something.
Survival Tip of the Day
Keep your head together. If you start to fall apart mentally or goof off, you'll make mistakes and get bit. - in reference to Roger from Dawn of the Dead (1978).
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