walking dead survival instinct is a game i bought on a random whim a long time ago, i'd only seen the first season of the show and then dropped off by then but i thought it looked fun, and with just how bad the reception to it was made me so curious i had to go out and pick up a copy and i actually loved it and i still do. these days i've seen much more of the show and i really like a lot of it, at least the first 6 seasons, and i love the spinoff "fear the walking dead" even more (though season 4 onward is kind of stinky, same with later TWD), they're a great time. after i finished both i ended up going back to this and decided to finish it up and i think its still just as fun as i thought before, a fun little dead-island lite road trip with norman reedus and i'd seriously reccomend it if that description sells you on it even at all.

it plays like a dead island lite, a slight focus on melee with some stealth and some limited ranged weapon options, it also reminds me a lot of land of the dead: road to fiddlers green for the original xbox, which i think is the best comparison, and if that comparison doesn't immediatly scare you off then let me say it's actually pretty fun! there's some limited survival aspects here like scavanging for gas and ammo and each pitstop in a major location always has its own cute little objectives and survivors to find and these all feed back into the games big road trip mechanic really well. the game is built around the big road trip with the daryls brother, merle (both voiced by the original actors) and on the way you will have to keep track of things like food and gas, you'll make route decisions which can take you to completely different levels, choose weather to take the highway or smaller offroads which could lead to mini-levels where you can scavange at places like parks and gas stations and you'll find things like new cars and survivors which have their own stats and uses, the survivors can even go on little missions for you at the risk of dying and you can get some good rewards from them. it's one of my favourite parts of the game because i think its a really cool setup and the level variety is pretty impressive, it could take you up to three playthroughs to see it all. combat can be a little jankey though, the shooting is fine enough and you do get a bow with reusable bolts which is really fun, but the melee is not up to even dead island standards and it does this weird thing where if a zombie grapples you it will make you do an aim QTE to headshot them with your knife, which is cool at first, then you learn you can abuse it to train and instakill hordes of zombies with basically no damage taken, it's broken as hell and does remove a lot of tension and if you want to nerf it i'd say up the difficulty from the outset. i'd say it mostly excells with the scavanging and exploration bits, every level is fun to explore and it can be super tense when you're low on health and ammo, just don't expect a ton of depth with combat and i think you'll have a good time.

it's not the best looking or sounding though, which you'd expect from a ps3 era licenced game, the music is done by Gordy Haab who's worked on a ton of star wars games and even some halo, so some people might get something out of it, but i didn't find any of it all that memorable, its a lot of very standard, what i'd almost call country horror music and i don't really vibe with it but it works for the game pretty well. The vocal performances are, like the equivelent of vocal jank, but at least the leads are doing their best here and as a fan of the show its nice to see more of both :) as inconsequencial as the journey is, it barely ties into anything really outside of some stuff like the helicopters you see later on maybe being related to the CRM. looks nice at least, at times, the models are mostly pretty bad but the levels are all varied and fun to see around, little small towns one road long, huge parks, hospitals and malls, pretty much anywhere you'd want to see in a road trip game, you even get a bombastic ending in a stadium to round it all out and you can see all it has to offer in a pretty quick time too, its only around 4 hours long on a first run, maybe 3 more to see the levels you missed along the way and i think it doesn't outstay its welcome for that, its a fun, easy weekend game.

despite all the walking dead games this one never really got a followup, there's the telltale games which do their own thing and are, ranging in quality (i do not like season 2), the fantastic saints and sinners which may be the best game on PSVR, onslaught which is the closest to a followup to this, being a janky first person VR game focusing on daryl and the rest of the shows cast directly, not as good as saints but still a good time and there was also that overkills TWD game thats basically forgotton and you cant even buy it anymore, which is a shame because it looked really cool, i may need to track down a file of it sometime. the game was made by terminal reality, which some people may know very well for a ton of smaller janky hits like blair witch: rustin parr, the bloodrayne series (a personal fav) and most importantly, one of the best PC horror games ever made, nocturne, this game isn't quite on the level of any of those games, but if you liked what TR was putting out, i think this would be worth a shot, or if you just like games like dead island, its on the ps3, which was my console of choice, but also the xbox and the wiiu, though i'd skip the wiiu version since it goes for absurd amounts of money, just google it and see, it's not worth that much, but the low price of the ps3 ver is more than worth a grab.