There's an urgency to reach another place, and the false sense of stability it promises. There is spontaneous violence and unexpected death, but no sense that the player truly could have avoided either.
New walking dead game 2017 xbox 360 series#
Two chapters in, Season Three of The Walking Dead feels almost like a reboot, gathering together all the concepts that gave the video game series its emotional force in the first two years and slamming them into two episodes. No matter how I negotiated the conflict, a major death and a near-fatal wound pushed everyone toward Richmond, Virginia, and their arrival delivered a cliffhanger leading into the third episode. It's in this portion where I realized that the most violent and emotional choice the game offers still delivers the same story path as the most rational and measured decision. Nonetheless, nothing ever lasts in The Walking Dead, and Javier and his friends are soon on the move, separated from their loved ones. Both she and Tripp, the camp leader, are likable and honest enough, which makes the decision to side with either a question of which character appeals more on a gut level. This story conflict introduces Eleanor, a camp doctor, to conspicuously move things along. There is an unavoidable complication involving Clementine and a former associate of hers, which ends. The story proceeds rotely from there, through a shootout with other survivors and then a visit to another settlement and an encounter with the faction that figures to be Season Three's ultimate antagonist. Inevitably, the player crosses paths with Clementine, in a luminously acted reunion that consolidates her as the central authority of this franchise, even if the player doesn't control her. The first big choice presented to the user underlines Kate's status as the resented stepmother to her children. Ultimately, Javier and his cohort reach a station rich with resources, and of course that is where the trouble begins. Season Three strands us in the form of a new character with unknown relationships, making the dialogue choices a seat-of-the-pants affair. Season Two involved Clementine and some understanding of her history from the first season. In Season One, the player was a convicted murderer saying nothing or safeguarding his past was a legitimate role-playing option. The establishing sequence quickly connects Javier to the zombie apocalypse, and then puts him on the run with Kate, his sister-in-law, and her two tweenage kids.Īlthough this covers a lot of ground expediently, it plops the user into a new story without much context to shape Javier's character or help him respond to the conflicts in the story. In the present day, the story is told through Javier, alienated from his family by his athletic celebrity and some vague, implied disgrace. A flashback with Jane, the Season Two heroine who leads Clementine through a quavering puberty into her steely young adulthood, was legitimately sorrowful, and emblematic of The Walking Dead's remorseless prosecution of its story, allowing only the perfunctory objection from the player. Her retrospectives are nonetheless harrowing. The player only takes control of her in flashback chapters that do not affect the overall arc of the story or any relationship with a character in it. Walking Dead fans looking to jump back into Clementine's story with this new game should temper their expectations. Clementine's retrospectives are harrowing This review will follow the series as it develops, with updates as each chapter arrives detailing the current state of the game.
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Most of the player's time will be spent with Javier Garcia, a former professional baseball player accompanying his brother's second wife and her distrustful stepchildren. Clementine, the only permanence in The Walking Dead's fickle and constantly reversible world, returns and is playable, but only in flashbacks. Players are given a new protagonist and can pour their rage into scenarios where a measured response would still end badly. The first two episodes of The Walking Dead: Season Three - also known by the mouthful of a name The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series - A New Frontier - hew to that model. After two seasons of Telltale Games' brilliant interpretation of The Walking Dead, many players have figured out its real game: It's in guessing which choices really do alter the story, and which ones are optional conversations or decisions that still funnel into the narrative the game had in mind all along.