The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival - Switch 2 Review
"A hard sell"
A new beat ‘em up based specifically on The Walking Dead TV series has been made by Odaclick Game Studio, giving fans a new way to experience the events of season 8. In The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival, fight your way through hordes of Zombies and Saviours with Rick, Darryl, and Michonne, with the not-so-secret character of Neegan to be unlocked. A small experience that captures the likeness of characters and environments in a pixel style wonderfully; however, the gameplay experience is not something to write home about, so I’ll write it for you.
The Good
The art team did a stellar job at translating the characters and backgrounds from their show counterparts into their pixel art equivalent. Playable characters are immediately recognisable, even to people who have only seen memes from The Walking Dead. The enemy designs all feel unique and made to fit their environment; even just the generic walkers provide a story in the design choices. If there's anything the team at Odaclick Game Studio should take home from this experience, it's giving their art and asset department free rein in their next release.
TL;DR
- Visually impressive
The Bad
You know how most games start off easy and progressively get more difficult as you go? Well, The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival just decided to do the complete opposite and have missions get easier as you go, while front-loading the hardest mission in the game as the second mission. This level requires you to break through barricades and then go around killing zombies. Sounds simple, right? Well now throw in an immortal one-hit killing enemy that chases you around on rubber band mechanics and any hit you take from the horde of zombies sends you closer to this monster. Truly frustrating to the nth degree.
That whole mission isn't helped by how unfair enemies feel. Zombies have larger hit boxes than it looks like; they'll hit the air and you'll get knocked on the ground. If a single enemy comes on the screen with a ranged weapon, you're now either stuck trying to take cover while avoiding melee enemies, or you're getting shot into a cycle of getting knocked down and trying to get up. This is exaggerated more so when there's more than one ranged enemy.
As a player you have a total of six options for combat, with one of them being locked behind a level-up system. A light combo, the same light combo but with a finisher, a kick that knocks enemies down, your ranged weapon, a melee weapon you pick up, and a special move. You'll end up just spamming the finisher combo with every single character 90% of the time. The ranged weapon is the strongest option, but extremely limited ammo and awkward aiming reduce the usefulness.
One of the core features of beat ‘em ups is co-op and smashing your way through waves of enemies with friends. This option is just completely missing here and it's just disappointing. My favourite memories with beat ‘em ups are playing through both of the Scott Pilgrim with one of my closest friends and laughing as we accidentally hit each other. Hopefully they can add multiplayer in the future, at least to the endless mode in the deluxe edition.
TL;DR
- Odd difficulty curve
- Unfair enemy mechanics
- No combat variation
- No multiplayer, local or online
Final Score: 3/10
I honestly can't recommend The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival to anyone but hardcore fans of the show, and even then it's a hard sell. While visually a gorgeous game, that is nowhere near enough to save it from the poorly designed gameplay. Committing some cardinal sins of beat ‘em ups of a single combo to execute and no multiplayer unfortunately has left Streets of Survival surrounded by a zombie horde, doomed to be turned into the one thing they swear to fight.
Thank you for checking out our The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival Switch review, thank you to Trailmark Games (via Five Star Games) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:
- Andrew Caluzzi (Inca Studios / Camped Out)
- Bel Cubitt
- Bobby Jack
- Jack Caven
- Nintendo Maniacs
- RedHero