The Haunted Hoard: The Walking Dead Onslaught (PS4)
In the world of The Walking Dead, you don’t always want to use a gun to take out a zombie. The crack of the gunshot could attract attention from other undead, bullets for your firearm are precious since they’re often hard to find, and if you don’t land the shot right you might end up wasting multiple bullets on a single zombie. In the virtual reality game The Walking Dead Onslaught you’ll also not want to use your guns very often, but that’s because in its world, they just aren’t very good.
Funnily enough though, some of the reasons the broader series discourages gun use aren’t the problem here. Ammo can often be found as you scrounge around for resources and usually the amount of zombies that could be aware of your presence at one time won’t be too greatly impacted by firing a gun. The issues arise more with their efficiency and accuracy. Despite being a game utilizing PlayStation VR and the Move controllers, you can’t just point and shoot and expect a bullet to fly true. Weapons have recoil, their bullets won’t necessarily fly right where you’re pointing, and the zombies you need to take out need to be hit in the right spot to instantly go down. Part of the inaccuracy in firing your weapon seems to exist to encourage holding your weapon up to look down the sights or even hold it with both hands to stabilize it, and this makes a bit of sense from a gameplay design perspective. Using a gun should have some risk, a group of hungry undead shambling towards you eager to eat your flesh should come with some pressure in a video game setting. Having to pull your gun up, aim carefully, and hold it steady would mean zombies have a fighting chance against you, but The Walking Dead Onslaught doesn’t force you to fight with just firearms, and that’s where we get to the point where the game is somewhat redeemed but also unable to correct some of its issues with its guns.
One of the first weapons you’ll get in The Walking Dead Onslaught is a knife, and it may be one of the best you’ll ever get. Its range is certainly short, but stabbing weapons in this survival game also have the reliable ability to kill a zombie instantly if you stab it right through a shambler’s skull. There is no impediment to aiming your knife so you can just lunge forward and pierce the head if your aim is good, but even if they get in close, the game allows you to use one hand to get a zombie in a choke hold. The zombie can’t hurt you while being choked, so you can line up the head stab and then toss them away to move onto grabbing and stabbing the next walker. Incredibly efficient and also incredibly satisfying once you get a knack for it, chaining together scalp stabs can sap some of the game’s overall difficulty but also keep things manageable once you realize the unreliable nature of bullet-based weaponry. Luckily, there are also ways the game tries to counter a stabbing spree. Zombies wearing police gear can’t be grabbed, ones with helmets and visors can’t be so easily stabbed in the face, and later walkers with spikes piercing through their body making letting them get in close rather dangerous. Large groups of zombies can also appear that mean you have to be quick if you want your knife-focused attack plan to pan out, and they can appear from different angles like from under cars or falling down from rooftops so managing them from all angles can still be a challenge. Funnily enough the guns can be your salvation here, guns like the assault rifle, shotgun, and lever action rifle good to keep as part of your set of four available weapons since they can be pulled out as a strong back up with ammo concerns less present when they’re more about bailing you out than carrying the combat.
Other weapons do crop up in The Walking Dead Onslaught like hammers and crowbars you can swing to knock the undead back while damaging them, and even if you do become a deft hand with a stabbing weapon, the game won’t necessarily become a cakewalk due to its smart structure. There are two main ways of playing The Walking Dead Onslaught, one being story focused and the other focuses on the broader survival and development of a community of human survivors after the world has been overrun with the living dead. Taking place within the show’s continuity after Rick Grimes and his community at Alexandria have fought off a different community known as the Saviors, Rick needs to focus on rebuilding the settlement but his more emotional and rebellious foil Daryl has gone off on his own after getting roped up into a story of a woman looking to save her daughter that the Saviors had kidnapped. Daryl’s seven chapter story is told in small chunks that don’t necessarily work well in the framework provided. It’s presented as him recounting his story to Rick to justify going out to find the girl and unfortunately that plot ends without much of a resolution, but it does provide a mode of play with structured battles, moments that focus in on how rough the world is after the collapse of normal society, and you even get checkpoints during the chapters so the game is happier to push against you with large groups.
The second type of play found in The Walking Dead Onslaught are scavenging missions though, and these really tap into the game’s survival elements. To develop Alexandria you’ll need to go out and find food and materials. Food will make more survivors turn up to your community, the player needing to hit benchmarks on how many people are in town to unlock new story chapters and new areas to scavenge. Materials are more broadly useful, as eventually you’ll be able to use them on building new community buildings or upgrading weaponry. Buildings can provide passive boosts like granting you a bit more food when you return from missions or helping you get more use out of found ammo or health. Upgrades purchased at the armory will carry over to all versions of a weapon you find be it one you brought with you on an excursion or one you find out in the field, these helping by removing some downsides from weapons like reducing recoil or simplifying reloading while also being able to add new functions like the knife acquiring the ability to sometimes steal a resource from a dead body or slow down a zombie you slash.
Grabbing every chemical, piece of tape, or chunk of wood the game allows you to pick up ends up feeling pretty valuable in increasing overall efficiency and pushing you to unlocking new story missions and scavenging zones quickly, but the scavenging missions are designed to place a strong pressure on you so it’s not so straightforward. While you’re rooting around in an old military camp, part of downtown, or a slice of the suburbs, there will be a time pressure. In some areas you’ll want to continue moving ever forward as a huge horde of zombies is gradually making its way into the area as represented by a moving red wall of light. You can enter areas bathed in the red light, but you’ll gradually lose health, meaning you can’t linger long. The slow march of the horde encourages you to be fast in your scavenging but there are often quite a few buildings you can enter and inevitably some active zombies that will try to attack you. It becomes important to pick when to fight or run, weigh the risk of pressing into an establishment’s basement or upper levels, and even a capable stabber can still find themselves struggling to cover all the ground they’d like. Requisitions where people request you to find specific items, unlockable weapons, and large caches of goods are placed randomly about so you can’t be fully sure any area can be adequately skipped, and trying to manage your time and safety means these can be especially tense. Failing one will let you keep a pittance of the resources you found, but you’ll have to start a mission from the beginning if you want another try, later scavenging missions especially long so your own strength won’t necessarily guarantee you success.
Some scavenging missions though take place in a single area, the player needing to scrounge around in a single enclosed space as they wait for an ally to turn up in a getaway van. These also serve as the capstone to certain longer scavenging missions and definitely thrive more on inundating you with abundant undead that have a good chance of swarming you from all sides, threat management more important than ever. A few little quirks might help you out, zombies can often bump into each other so they can’t attack well when clustered, but if your VR set-up isn’t arranged just so there can be times where a zombie is too close to attack properly or it might not read the strength of an attack well. Usually you can accommodate this somehow and the game is even a bit flexible in how you control, offering many movement styles like choosing from gradual or snap turning and teleportation movement or holding a button to walk. Other areas like who you want to play as while on a scavenging missions feel weak though, no real apparent difference between playing Michonne, Rick, and the surprising choice of Carol, although since she was one of the show’s actors to lend their voice along with Norman Reedus as Daryl, that could be why she got the bump to playable status.
THE VERDICT: The Walking Dead Onslaught can be a rough experience if you don’t learn the value of a stabbing tool and the situational nature of firearms, but once you do get a feel for its gameplay style, this VR game can establish a satisfying if sometimes flawed loop of play. You can effectively stab your way through much of the living dead, but the game can still position them well or apply extra pressures like the moving horde to keep a sense of danger present. Material collection incentivizes risky play but with worthwhile payoffs that push you closer to rebuilding Alexandria and completing Daryl’s story, so while the actual plot does feel like it tapers off oddly, the community building feels like it mixes in survival elements well to keep you motivated and engaged to see things through to the end.
And so, I give The Walking Dead Onslaught for PlayStation 4…
An OKAY rating. While the skull stab chains are gratifying to experience and require a bit of skill to pull off swiftly, they are sort of a symptom of The Walking Dead Onslaught’s weapon design ethos. The knife feels like it’s meant to be a last ditch tool for when the zombies get in close but its strength means you can repel even large bands of zombies, although the game avoids being completely robbed of difficulty thanks to the fact you still need to manage that crowd well to avoid being overwhelmed. Guns, a killing option with some reasonable limits on it so they also don’t invalidate the threat the walkers pose, are a bit too restricted in how effective they can be, pushing you again towards the raw efficiency of the standard knife. You can swap in weapons like the machete too if you’d rather hack your way through groups and guns get to shine when you spot some dynamite to shoot or zombies adorned in body armor, but the way you fight feels imbalanced and much of what ends up working in The Walking Dead Onslaught are elements outside of the actual zombie killing. The scavenging missions are smartly designed survival challenges, the player needing to make threat assessments since the rewards for exploration can be high but slipping up can lead to big losses. The community building and unlocking new story chapters happens at a good clip if you can find the right flow for scavenging and spending the collected resources, although the story fumbles its own payoff quite a bit. When the credits start it almost feels like a true ending got skipped since there wasn’t much of a definitive answer on what will happen next and continuing to play on after has characters talk like there was a resolution. Since the game seems reticent to include intelligent human enemies you also are mostly contending with the same enemy throughout that sometimes wears better defensive gear.
The Walking Dead Onslaught saves itself with an effective structure and some of the visceral thrill of fighting off the undead in VR. When you use your guns appropriately, their failings won’t feel so frustrating, and with the knife and other melee weapons encouraging close range combat, you also get a lot more involved in defending yourself. Your fate is in your hands more than it is the availability of ammunition, and the scavenging missions are where things really come together to capture the fight for survival that The Walking Dead likes to depict. The Walking Dead Onslaught doesn’t feel like it’s always able to provide the game experience the designers intended, but it had enough thought put into certain systems that it can still have entertaining moments despite stagnating or coming up short elsewhere.