2006 was an excellent year for gaming as a whole. It was here where the iconic, successful PlayStation 3 was released. This console also played host to a couple of amazing games under The Walking Dead’s popular IP. Those games were TellTale’s first two of four seasons along with the now-defunct Terminal Reality’s The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, both very solid games.

Graphically speaking, those games would be considered dated in the world of today. This is understandable, as both came out well over a decade ago. Entering this train of thought is the recently released The Walking Dead: Destinies. This was crafted by Flux Game Studios, and it tries to place players inside the universe of the critically acclaimed TV show. Players are encouraged to take a second look at what happened in the TV show and, by extension, the comic series. As the name of the game somewhat implies, players can decide to have the story undergo massive changes and can see how they play out. Key characters can be killed off early, and characters who met their demise early on in the TV show can be preserved.

Sadly, the reason this game is getting spoken in the same breath as PS3 era games is because it bears many, unfortunate resemblances to a game made during the PS3 era. In 2023, for a game costing $49.99 at full price, this is a travesty.

Let’s talk about what little this game does well before we begin to unpack its many deficiencies. This one might be a little bit surprising, as Flux Studios has a lot to answer for, in and out of the game.

Skill Trees (mechanically)

Skill trees are pretty straightforward. In theory, they should be pretty interesting to interact with. To sum it up, the player will earn skill points as they progress through the game. They can then invest these points into various skills harbored by characters across the game. Skills acquired extend to all characters the player will play as. However, there is a catch — if a character dies, any skills the player did not get from them will be permanently sealed off for good. This is good because it encourages macro-gaming and more overall strategizing from the player, especially for those who watched the TV show or read the comics.

Given that Merle Dixon could potentially depart from the game early, the player may feel pressured into acquiring his skills early on- but if his skills aren’t ideal per the player’s strategy, this could throw an interesting wrench at the player that presses a tough decision on them. Do I get his skills and hold off on getting better ones, or do I get the better skills early on in return for never being able to unlock those of Merle?

Sadly, skill trees are extremely annoying to interact with, mostly for reasons which will be discussed later. But at the very least, the system displays some promise should Flux Game Studios try this type of game again in the future.

Darryl Dixon/Atticus Batacan

Unfortunately, voice acting in this game is mostly a steaming pile of rubbish. Well, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. This served to benefit Atticus Batacan, who was tasked with voicing the iconic Darryl Dixon. He doesn’t do a perfect job, but he does a fairly admirable performance in emulating arguably the most iconic character this franchise has to offer.

Gameplay

Gameplay, when it works, is marginally not-awful. It is about the most bland, tasteless set of combat mechanics anyone could ask for. I’m really grasping at straws looking for something nice to say about this game, so here you go: gameplay at least doesn’t suck, all the time, when something doesn’t break and cause some horrible bug to pop up. It is relatively satisfying taking a few walkers down with melee attacks and performing executions on them. As well, the Assault Rifle is gloriously overpowered, and using it to mow down a horde of walkers is pretty fun.

Now, where do we begin unpacking why this game is absolutely abysmal?

Presentation

Graphical fidelity admittedly isn’t at the tippity top of most gamers’ list of priorities in terms of what makes a game good. Still, it at least has to be better than noticeably terrible. This game fails to live up to even that incredibly forgiving standard. Facial animations on characters are absolutely wretched, devoid of any sort of personality or, quite frankly, effort spent in development. Frequently, the player may hear a character doing something such as digging a ditch, only when they approach the character digging, they’ll be thrusting a shovel at the grassy ground visually doing nothing to the ground. The subject of presentation leads us perfectly into our next segment…

Cutscenes

Cutscenes are gut-wrenchingly awful and difficult to take even slightly seriously. On top of the game’s eye-sore graphics are cutscenes which are basically slideshows. Oftentimes, cutscenes struggle to do a good job properly conveying what is even happening. Oftentimes, the player will have to rely on haphazard voicelines to try and deduce how characters feel or react during cutscenes. If graphical fidelity was even half decent, this style of cutscene could maybe be forgiven, but it simply isn’t.

Performance

Occasionally, the game’s sound will just turn itself off. The character will make no noise, the game’s soundtrack just turns off, even walkers are put on mute. This seems to happen at random intervals after interacting with something in the environment, like opening a door or moving aside an obstacle. Frame drops are relatively rare, but they do pop up when the player is faced with a large amount of enemies to kill, or worse yet during a time sensitive activity. Finally, when picking up a gun and immediately using it, the character will sometimes visually and bizarrely seem to wield the gun with a different hand than they usually would. This causes the camera to essentially panic until the characters stops aiming down the sight of their newfound gun.

In the overworld, walking near characters always gives the option to press a button to talk with them. However, the player can exhaust their dialogue, still be prompted to talk, and pressing the talk button at this point will simply do nothing at all.

With all of the graphical issues this game has, combined with the barebones engine resembling a 20 year old game, how could there possibly be performance issues? What is the game trying to run on the side that is causing these problems? At least a genuinely new, fresh game like Lords of the Fallen could conceivably come up with a lame excuse for its performance issues. This game plays like a mobile app, yet it has many problems running on a modern console like the PlayStation 5. Absolutely inexcusable.

Interacting With Skill Trees

If you want to actually unlock skills with the points you earn, as the game intends, do yourself a favor and mute the game’s audio before doing so. It could be as simple as removing your headphones, or using a TV remote to mute the entire unit. You will want to do so because every time you choose a skill, the character you are playing will comment on the skill chosen. These definitely are not interesting, unique voice lines meant to reflect an individual skill. No, this is the character being played shouting something to the tune of “That’s great! This’ll come in handy!” in the same annoying, monotonous tone as one another every single time.

This is unfortunately why the skill tree is only good in this game “in theory.” Honestly, if the characters just said nothing at all when choosing a skill, it would be a hundred times better.

Disappointingly misleading

This game markets itself as a means to rewrite the events of the story. This is a straightforward enough concept; if you could change a few key moments from the TV show, how would you? Yet, having finished the game, I still struggle to say I’ve actually managed to answer another, equally important question the game asks: if you change important events, what happens?

The reason for this is that Flux Studios just decided to rewrite the events of the story on their own, then ask the player to make a decision that impacts this recasting. We will go in depth as to what this means in the paragraph below.

SPOILER ALERT, VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED

The game’s first major decision is both faithful to the franchise and straightforward enough to appreciate. It replays the iconic conflict between Merle Dixon and T-Dog on the roof of a tall building in Atlanta. Merle is being blatantly racist and attempting to provoke T-Dog, who is simply defending himself and trying to keep the peace. As Rick Grimes, the player can carry out the events that actually happen in the TV show, where they handcuff Merle to a ventilation tube on the roof and eventually leave him behind when the group leaves the area. The player can instead choose to support Merle, for as disgusting as that would be, and do the same handcuffing to T-Dog.

After this choice, things get ugly. Beth Greene or Carl Grimes will be killed during the player’s next decision, forcing them to choose between retrieving medical supplies for the dying boy or save Beth from walkers at the expense of leaving said supplies behind. This simply doesn’t happen in the show or the comics, as Beth wouldn’t end up dying for seasons to come, neither would Carl.

This isn’t the first or last time this happens, and the number of faithless adaptations this game imposes outweigh the faithful. Given that the whole point of the game was to rewrite canonical events in the story, the fact the player doesn’t get to do that is genuinely dishonest. In other words, if you purchased this game, you were arguably outright scammed out of your money.

This is by far this game’s biggest, most unforgivable sin. Games can suck, but Flux Studios put in a half-assed effort on this game, lied to their players about the experience they were receiving, and made off like bandits selling this terrible product for $50 apiece.

This game gets an F-. Is it possible to give something a G for a grade? If so, let’s do that. You know what, let’s settle with giving this game a big fat L for a grade. Flux Studios can mostly definitely take an L for this pile of deceptive, lazy, uninspiring and disappointing garbage.