Overkill's The Walking Dead

Overkill's The Walking Dead is a cooperative first-person shooter for four players, featuring survival, stealth, and RPG elements. It is based on the comics by Robert Kirkman. The objective for each player during the game is to survive, but teamwork is crucial, as each squad member has abilities that enhance the team.

Overkill's The Walking Dead is tightly bound to the storyline, which revolves around repeatedly completing game levels while fulfilling main and side quests.

The premise is as follows: after most of the population of Washington turns into zombies, the few remaining survivors split into two factions. Some join the "Georgetown Survivors," while others align with the criminal group "The Family." The writers quickly explain why the former are good and the latter are bad.

Players are then faced with a straightforward, relentless story of terrible revenge. Another attack from the bad guys fills the cup of patience for the good, and justice must be served – by stealing, killing, and looting. There are no plot twists, unexpected stories, changes of plans, intrigue, or even character development.

After breaks in gameplay, the plot is completely forgotten, as it is shown in short clips, and the declared story arc for each character lacks a well-thought-out narrative. Even the dialogues are sparse.

Despite early claims from the developers, there is no open world in Overkill's The Walking Dead. Instead, there are six large, handcrafted levels that resemble a real city after the apocalypse – with many destroyed buildings, abandoned cars, and debris, as well as barricades and fences.

Every building, even multi-story ones, can be entered, explored, or equipped as a position for firing or observation. The buildings have correct proportions and human layout, and if necessary, players can board up doorways to slow down enemy advancement.

The levels feature small puzzles – somewhere players need to find a battery and start a mechanism, turn gears, and so on. They are solved through the efforts of the entire team. All this creates an excellent atmosphere of a zombie apocalypse.

Locations transform with the change of day and night. During the day, players can fight their way through, while at night, they need to use stealth, avoiding lit areas and resorting to silent kills.

The gameplay mechanics of Overkill's The Walking Dead borrow heavily from Payday 2 (mutual aid, cooperative actions) and Left 4 Dead (zombies standing idly in locations, as well as a horde being triggered when noise is made). Additionally, each level features two types of enemies – zombies and members of "The Family."

During gameplay, players are forced to change tactics, as zombies introduce an element of surprise that disrupts plans. Thus, the team can move stealthily together along a long route; fight their way through the shortest path; or split into pairs to simultaneously complete different tasks in various ways.

The gameplay forces stealth, as zombies can overwhelm players in numbers, and in some situations, they arrive endlessly, while ammunition is scarce. A key component of survival is the constant search for useful supplies scattered in different locations of the level.

The combat mechanics are extensive – shooting with 5 types of weapons with different physics and noise; fighting with bats and rebar at knife distance, inflicting injuries according to the "thickness" of the zombie, but not killing immediately; fatalities in close combat with a knife and QTE when zombies grab the player.

To survive in a zombie apocalypse, players can choose one of four heroes:

Each character has three different unique abilities (marking targets on the map, healing, etc.), armor, and a stamina reserve used during physical attacks. Since there are few characters, players can choose the same ones repeatedly.

The online game suffers from a lack of modes and maps. Missions are divided into exploring locations for quests (searching for an item and the entrance to the room where it is located), attacking the "Family" base, and a camp defense mode (players defend a shelter that is being stormed by hordes of zombies).

Since there are only 6 locations, the developers had no choice but to make players constantly replay them, completing various side and story missions, either for resource gathering, character leveling, and base upgrades. Difficulty is not adjustable, so a team of four players is needed for victory.