Hey, check it out — another free-to-play game with typical energy mechanics and city building aspects that will be familiar to anyone who’s played a similar build and battle game in the last year or so.
Unlike the other games, however, this one is set in Robert Kirkman’s award-winning comic book series. Titled The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, it’s set in the fortified town of Woodbury just prior to The Governor’s arrival. Fans of the story might enjoy messing about in the universe, especially with the fantastic, comic book-style art that infuses this whole project with an authentic zombie-apocalypes feel.
Check out the gameplay video below to see what I mean.
It’s fun to see favorite characters like Glenn or Rick, but ultimately, whether you’ll enjoy The Road to Survival will mostly depend on how big a fan you are of the series. If you can’t stomach yet another game that makes you wait for buildings to finish, well, building, and a turn-based tap fest combat in the battle portions of the game aren’t your cup of tea, you’re going to get bored fairly fast.
There are some player choices within the larger battles, which deliver story beats via dialog bubbles and explanatory boxes, but the writing feels overall melodramatic. Not everyone needs to have a gritty checkered past, but it seems as if most of the characters in this game do.
The typical themes of The Walking Dead (non-zombie humans are worse than the undead, you have to kill or be killed at times, not everyone on your team are good guys) are present here, but it’s all gummed up with the gameplay mechanics. The combat has some interesting rock-paper-scissors strategy in it in terms of figuring out which team members to equip and which enemies to target, but it’s all rather rote.
If you don’t mind paying with in-game coins for your houses or town hall to upgrade so you can hold more cans of food and ammo, and you enjoy some mindless turn-taking battles, Walking Dead: The Road to Survival could be a fun way to spend some of your gaming time. Personally, I’m more partial to Telltale’s deeper take on the universe, but I’m happy to level up some characters and shoot zombies now and then.
This collaboration between free-to-play studio Scopely, veteran mobile studio IUGO, and Kirkman’s own Skybound media company, Walking Dead: The Road to Survival is available for free on iOS and Android right now, so if you’re a Kirkman zombie fan with some extra time to kill, have at it.
