The Walking Dead 2 Episode 1 Review

Note: this blog has been migrated to Medium, with the articles here available to preserve permalinks. Please see this post at https://medium.com/@ianrbuck/the-walking-dead-2-episode-1-review-7a0116f9e389#.tdybqwvi9

If you have not played The Walking Dead Season 1 yet, you probably shouldn't read this. I reserve the right to spoil things that you would know by the time you play Season 2.

Sometimes we do things even though we know they will cause us strife. That is the only reason I can think of for why I started playing Season 2 of The Walking Dead. I knew that nothing good could come of it, but darn it I was not going to miss out on the rest of Clementine's story.

One of the things that I was most excited about was the fact that the decisions I made during Season 1 would carry over and have an impact in Season 2. And indeed, the game found my save files and imported them properly, but I didn't notice anything during the first episode that had anything to do with what I had done during Season 1. That includes the 400 Days DLC. The story didn't suffer as a result, but I spent most of the episode waiting for one of the characters to show up or some fallout from a decision I had made earlier to bite me in the butt. Nothing of the sort happened.

Being that Clementine is a lot smaller than Lee, the combat played out much differently. Instead of struggling with the zombies and trying to bash their heads in, Clementine usually runs and dodges away from whatever is chasing her. There were also far fewer puzzles, and those that were present were fairly straightforward. Honestly most of the episode was a continuous push forward, with few hub areas to simply explore and talk to people.

Overall I would call this episode a setup episode. Telling you what it is setting up would be a spoiler, but it might be in your best interest to wait and find out how good the next episode is before deciding whether or not to buy the whole season.

Interactively making a 10 year old give themselves stitches was quite the experience though.

EDIT: You can now read my review of Episode 2.