The Haunted Hoard: The Walking Dead (Arcade)

Light gun arcade games are usually able to succeed with their simple accessible premise. Grab one of the plastic guns on the cabinet, point at the things on the screen, and fire away, sometimes pointing away if you need to reload. The hammering of the trigger and focus mostly on letting you go nuts with rapid fire means players of many different ages and skill levels can usually have a good time playing them, but The Walking Dead’s arcade machine decides against this easy path to generic success. Giving you a plastic crossbow peripheral instead, accuracy will be a lot more important in this video game adaptation of AMC’s hit television show.

 

In The Walking Dead, the goal is to kill an abundance of zombies, or as they are called in this series Walkers, in order to survive, but simply shooting them anywhere on the body will not slow them down much. To put a Walker down for good you must shoot them in the head, there being no wiggle room when using the crossbow’s default fire as any shot elsewhere on the body won’t stop them from shambling towards you to try and take a bite. Luckily the crossbow is able to hold eight bolts at a time and fire fairly quickly, but the focus on accuracy is less about your gun’s capabilities and more about keeping the often overwhelming tide of foes at bay either on your own or with a second player helping out. If you aren’t landing those headshots often enough you’ll be crowded by hungry Walkers who will quickly wear down your health and force you to put in some more cash if you want to keep playing, but even though the Walkers have fairly normal human body proportions it isn’t too hard to shoot heads if you keep your cool. In a nice little touch, the crossbow’s reloading is done by pulling on a lever similar to the one used to draw bolts on a real crossbow, and since reloading isn’t too slow either, you can focus on lining up your shots some instead of worrying about finding yourself with no bolts in a pinch.

The particular framing for this Walker killing spree is that two characters invented solely for this game, Jason and Kara, find themselves in the West Georgia Correctional Facility from the show. The prison has been overrun with the undead, all of them eager to find their next meal while Jason and Kara try to find a way out that isn’t just right into the hands of the zombies surrounding the place. They’ll meet other people along the way, mostly other survivors who start cooking up the escape plan with them and a character who ends up more worried about his own safety than others to introduce a little conflict, but mostly it will be running around the prison to find things or save people. Saving people is actually a mechanic in The Walking Dead, the action sometimes slowing down and zooming in on someone the Walkers have grabbed and giving you a moment to try and shoot all the zombies grabbing them to prevent them from meeting a grim fate. If you’re too slow to hit the heads of all the attacking Walkers here you’ll receive a health penalty similar to the kind you might receive for shooting an ally or panicking person yourself, but save them successfully and instead you’ll get a small health refill to help you keep going on your current credit.

 

You do have a pretty good amount of health per life in The Walking Dead, although sometimes the game plays a touch unfair to ensure it can get in a hit no matter how good you are at landing headshots. The camera will sometimes whip around an area as it reflects either the first person view of Jason or Kara depending on the point in the story, and when it settles on some action a Walker might immediately be in your face and attack so fast you practically have to be aiming at the head already to hit in time. These cases are rare enough that it doesn’t often feel like the game is going for a cheap shot and so long as you don’t get too complacent sometimes your targeting reticle will be in the right spot if you aim near the center. For the most part though you will have time to see those Walker hordes shuffling towards you, the player needing to be quick and precise when the numbers are high but canny when a Walker comes at you from an unexpected angle like around a piece of level geometry or out of a shadow in the areas where you can only see where your weapon and thus flashlight are pointing. Walkers are mostly mindless wanderers pointed in your direction until they’re close enough to attack, their numbers what makes them threatening and thrilling as you both get the satisfaction of immediately eliminating a target when you do land a headshot but know that you have plenty more work to do until your character automatically moves on to the next area.

You could say The Walking Dead is pretty close to a shooting gallery with abundant targets that move in sometimes unusual fashions, and while the location variety is minimal by keeping it in a grounded realistic setting, the Walkers still don’t have the time to get repetitive. Keeping up with the action since it is demanding that level of accuracy without it being extremely difficult to land a headshot keeps you constantly invested and the frequent shifts from one group of Walkers to the next means you rarely find yourself picking through the last dregs of a group that was ambling your way. Every now and then The Walking Dead does make sure to introduce new ways to fight back as well. Gas canisters might be laying to the side, the player able to shoot them to clear out huge groups with only a single precise shot on the explosive. More interesting if harder to hit are the moments where an ally starts chucking these gas canisters into huge crowds, time slowing some to help you hit them but the timing on doing so often important to thinning out the crowds as much as you can.

 

Sometimes Jason and Kara will find some new weapons to try out for a while against the undead, all of them still using the crossbow peripheral for attacking even if they’re something like a crowbar. Some Walkers can only be cracked by heavier attacks like those the crowbar can dish out so there are moments you get to swing the tool around wildly to either wear down a Walker in riot gear or just smash your way through a crowd. Throwing hatchets and the nail gun still require you to hit the head to kill a target, the difference between such options being things like the rate of fire or if it might help stagger a Walker to buy you a bit more time before you land the killshot. The explosive arrows are probably the most interesting in that you can now just target a Walker’s center of mass without much worry, the explosion bound to kill them and plenty of nearby undead as well. The moments you can let loose with these tools that let you be a little less cautious in where you aim for a while is a nice break to embrace some unexpected power, but it really is the crossbow’s dependence on headshots that give this game its unique and exciting energy as it achieves a nice balance between demanding skill but not making kills too hard to achieve.

THE VERDICT: The Walking Dead does mostly throw you up against constant waves of undead without mixing in too many breaks from the format, but the basics of this light gun shooter help it succeed all the same. The crossbow peripheral and its need to be accurate to earn kills makes huge hordes of Walkers consistently tense to face as you’re always working hard to keep them at bay, and those moments you do get a new weapon to simplify it some are a nice breather before you’re back trying to ensure each shot is a headshot. Outside of a few cheap zombie ambushes though The Walking Dead mostly maintains its focus on decent precision despite how many undead pose a threat to you, and moments like needing to save civilians give you some quick objectives beyond just shooting down the nearest Walkers to you to ensure you live on.

 

And so, I give The Walking Dead for arcade machines…

A GOOD rating. Without the crossbow’s need to hit zombies in the head to put them down, The Walking Dead’s shooting would probably be too basic to keep it entertaining. The pretty standard zombie escape plot isn’t too engaging or fulfilling to see unfold and the game doesn’t concoct too many different Walker types to keep up the variety, but because you’re always aiming for heads, simply putting the undead in different positions can change the difficulty quite a bit. A claustrophobic corridor has a different feeling then the wide rooms filled with so many Walkers you couldn’t possibly kill them all, and when lurking in the dark you might find an unexpected sight like a still moving legless Walker pinned to the wall in a place it could be easy to miss if you aren’t thorough. You’ll notice reused models for your undead targets a fair bit but the group composition keeps fresh enough between those hostage saving situations and the indulgences of having better weapons briefly that The Walking Dead doesn’t lose its energy or its thrills. It knows how long to linger on a situation before sending your character off to the next pack of Walkers, the skill test of having to handle a new batch of targets swiftly keeping you invested and on edge even if individual moments don’t stand out due to the similarities between situations.

 

While a simple zombie shooter probably would be generically satisfying, blasting apart undead an easy kind of activity to turn your brain off and indulge in, The Walking Dead avoids mediocrity just with its simple choice to be a bit more demanding than more typical arcade fare. You will be worn down quickly if you can’t land those headshots and every group of Walkers is able to pose a threat because putting them down won’t come too easily. Smartly this four chapter experience takes only about a half hour to complete, although you can jump in at your preferred chapter if you’re coming back to the game later. Keeping the time concise and speeding you along through constant danger keeps the energy high enough you only really think back on the lack of appreciable variety in retrospect. This high octane shooter stands out in arcades that are often fine with letting you earn a kill as long as you pump enough lead into something, The Walking Dead almost inverting the style even the game’s publisher Raw Thrills usually relies on. In their other light gun games like Terminator Salvation you can fire wildly before a boss or specific foe requires sudden focused fire, but The Walking Dead makes focusing your fire the key to success with some breaks to go wild with some odd weapon. Even if it’s not about wildly shooting things though, the fight for survival is definitely felt thanks to opposition requiring that little extra work to take out.