Here we go again zombie nuts; Telltale released The Walking Dead Episode 3: Long Road Ahead and it falls to the shoulders of this reviewer to let you know how it stacks up to the last two episodes. Unfortunately though, my new favorite zombie game has ran into a major hiccup.
In my excitement to play this newest episode I had my wife start the download so I could jump straight to it when I got home from work. I walked in the door and immediately grabbed a glass of Kool-Aid, threw some pizza rolls in the toaster oven and moved my beanbag chair in front of the TV. I was ready to continue the epic journey that I had left off on in episode two; here is where the problems started.
Upon launching The Walking Dead for the Xbox 360 there wasn’t any sign of the mess to come. When I chose to load up my game and continue into episode three, I was taken back to the beginning of episode one. In quick desperation I immediately turned off my 360, unfortunately though I didn’t make it. The Walking Dead had already saved over top of my old game leaving me with none of my saves or any kind of acknowledgment that I had already beaten episode one and two.
Needless to say I was ticked. After a good 10 or 15 minutes of pacing around my place yelling and ranting, I decided to take my problems to the Internet, specifically the Telltale support forums. After some small investigation I find that this is a problem that lots of people are having across all platforms. As I’m writing this review there still isn’t any patch out to fix this issue nor has Telltale even gone so far as to acknowledge that there is a problem. Hopefully a patch comes out soon, but until then I have to advise against purchasing episode three until these problems are sorted out.
Editor’s Note: Other players have recently played the game without the save-game erase problem. Whether this was due to a patch or just luck is unknown.
I still did play through episode three. The Walking Dead game allows for players to jump into the game at any episode without having had to play the others. The game will instead make random decisions for all of the major choices missed out on in the previous episodes. Luckily for me the random choice generator picked most of the same choices I had. Sure it wasn’t the same game I spent all that time with before, but I went with it if only to see the next part of the story unfold.
The story is really why all of us are playing The Walking Dead. The choices we make and how we affect the story is such a moving part of the game that it really pushes the morals and instincts of the player to points never reached before within a game. Episode three does not disappoint either. Looking back at the previous two episodes I can easily say that episode three has the most moving story yet. Truth be told I can’t really figure out how exactly Telltale is going to top themselves in the last two episodes. I’d love to get more into detail about the story, but this is just one of those cases where I really don’t want to spoil a single thing for anyone who hasn’t already played the game.
Gameplay in The Walking Dead hasn’t changed much over the last two games. The basic idea of quick time like events and having a limited time to reply to other characters remains. A couple of instances in the game put us behind the scope of a sniper rifle, but it isn’t anything so strenuous as to push away the non FPS gamers out there.
The graphics of episode three are the same as before. As with episode two I didn’t notice any teleporting characters or zombies, unfortunately though I did run into a very poor segment of lip syncing later in the game. It was only for a couple of scenes but it was bad enough that I soon started searching the horizon for any sign of a giant radioactive lizard.
As with the graphics, I don’t have much in the way of complaints for episode three. The bad lip synching mentioned above is the real only negative part I can think of. The new characters introduced in this episode are voiced very well, so I don’t have anything to criticize there, and everything else is on par with the rest of the series.
In conclusion, The Walking Dead Episode 3: Long Road Ahead is easily the most moving and entertaining part of the game released so far. Unfortunately though its initial release is plagued with save breaking bugs and glitches. Once everything is cleared up, I highly suggest picking up episode three. It’s quite an experience.
The Walking Dead Episode 3: Long Road Ahead overcomes it problems and gets 4.5 GiN Gems out of 5!