Played on Playstation 3

Originally written August 27, 2014

I’ll say this right away, if you haven’t played the first season of The Walking Dead game, stop reading this review and go play it. It’s an amazing display of storytelling done right, and more relevant to this review, it’s practically required to play this game. Of course you’re not unable to play this without playing the first season, but it’s pointless because you won’t be familiar with the characters, and it’s a very story-driven game. Not only that, but choices you made in the first season will carry over to this season if you have a save file for it, so I recommend playing the first season. The game will choose those choices for you if you don’t have a save file, but I find it so much more rewarding to have the game catered to your choices in the story. All of that being said, I’m writing the rest of my review with the assumption that you’ve played the first season, so spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned.

Story:

The story for Season Two picks up months after the ending of the first season, with main protagonist Clementine desperately missing her friend, caretaker, and father figure Lee from the first game. She’s been traveling around with Christa and Omid, but loses both early on and is on her own. She’s no longer a scared little girl and is now surviving. She eventually finds a new group of people, who she’s unsure if she can trust. The story goes a lot of different places from here, but elaborating would be going into spoiler territory. Basically, much like the first game, it’s a story of survival. The big difference is where in the first game you were playing as a grown man, Lee, trying to protect a child, Clementine, now you’re playing as Clementine trying to survive on her own since Lee is now dead.

The first season had such a strong story, one that I believe had one of the best stories I’ve seen in a video game. Looking back, I feel like what made the story so great is the strong bond that Lee had with Clementine. So, unfortunately, with that bond now gone, the story of Season Two does suffer slightly. It’s definitely still a great story, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find it slightly inferior. The writers manage to put Clementine in some really interesting scenarios, and her survival is still a big concern for the player, facing incredible odds. The choices that you have to make are still really well done too. While most of the time you’re given illusion of choice, with “choices” that wind up having the same outcome on the overall story, there are certain choices that add up to having a huge impact on certain story aspects. What you do does matter, and there were still many times in Season Two where I actually had to pause the game and think about what would be the best decision to make in a situation. There are some tough choices, and it’s interesting to see where they take the game. Season Two has about five different endings that I’m aware of, so your decisions definitely have an impact.

Gameplay:

The gameplay of the Season Two remains widely unchanged from the first game. You still have three different kinds of things you do gameplay-wise as the player: walk around and examine/talk, make dialogue choices, and do quick-time events for action sequences. They do cut down a lot on the walking around parts in this one, keeping it more compact in story. It definitely cuts down gameplay time, so that might be disappointing for some. I consider it a good thing though, as I felt in the first game there were times when I was walking around clicking on everything, not sure what I was supposed to do to advance the story. This game keeps the ball rolling, and I like that.

Graphics:

Again, not much has changed between the two seasons here. The game still has a cell-shaded graphics style, and the artwork is really beautiful. The Walking Dead proves you don’t need motion-capture HD real life graphics to capture the emotion on a character’s face. The biggest unfortunate thing is that Season Two still has the biggest drawback the first one did, and that’s how it runs. There are severe moments of lag, where the picture will freeze while the audio still runs forward, waiting for it to catch up. I think it might be improved slightly here, but I was really hoping this would be something that they would have fixed for Season Two.

Sounds:

The music of the game is still just as fitting in Season Two as it was for the first game. It does a really good job of setting the mood in certain scenes, with intense music for the action scenes and some more somber tones for the more emotional moments. Voice acting also really helps contribute to this. Aside from the usual fantastic voice work for Clementine, there’s a lot of new characters in Season Two, and I never felt like any voice was out of place. All of the voice actors did really good bringing life into their characters, and carrying them through every scene. The sound effects also fit in very nicely, so I’d say the sound department did great here.

Length/Replay Value:

Season Two is definitely shorter than the first season, but the proper length of a game usually seems to be subjective, so I can’t say whether that’s a good or bad thing. It’s still five episodes long, but while each episode was around three hours long in the first season, in Season Two each episode is only about two hours long. So you’re looking at about a 10 hour game total instead of 15. I never felt like the game overstayed its welcome here, nor did I feel cheated out of any story, so I’d say it’s at a good length. As for replay value, it’s really up to the player. After you play through the game, there’s no extra things for completion or anything like that. No other modes, no non-story related trophies, or anything like that. The replay value comes in the form of seeing the story unfold in different ways by choosing different dialogue and making different choices. You can experience the story in a few different ways, so if that’s something that interests you then there is some replay value.

My overall feelings for The Walking Dead: Season Two are that it’s still a great story-driven game, it just doesn’t quite fully live up to the first season. I definitely recommend it for fans of the first game that are wondering what lies in store next for Clementine.

4/5