The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is a single-player post apocalyptic first-person shooter video game developed by Terminal Reality and published by Activision for mh:awesomegames:Microsoft Windows, mh:awesomegames:PlayStation 3, Wii U, and mh:awesomegames:Xbox 360. In contrast to the Telltale Games-published adaptation based on the comics series, Survival Instinct is based on the TV show.

At the time, it was the last game developed by Terminal Reality, who closed down on December 12, 2013. However, the studio revived in 2018.

Why It Should be Eaten by Zombies

 * 1) Despite being based off a franchise known for its heavy emphasis on story and human drama, there's barely a story.
 * 2) * The whole story is that Daryl's father dies by Walkers while hunting with Daryl and his friend Jess. During this, Jess gets bitten, and Daryl and Jess decide to head out and find Merle. During their journey, Jess turns and gets killed by Daryl. Daryl eventually finds Merle, and tells Daryl to go meet up at a bar to team up with some bikers. At the bar. Merle gets into a gunfight and abandons Daryl. It's after this that Daryl hears about a military base taking in survivors. He eventually makes it, but comes to find out it's been overrun with Walkers and Merle comes to save him. The two ride off in a military truck and the game ends.
 * 3) The ending is terrible since it ends with Daryl fighting off hordes of Walkers using a turret and then Daryl and Merle leave the military base together, where the game just cuts to black and ends.
 * 4) The survivors you meet along the way are one note, have almost no personality, and are forgettable. It seems like the only reason they exist is so the game doesn't feel barren.
 * 5) The survivors are not only terrible as characters, but mechanically. The player can recruit survivors to their group during the game and choose to send them on missions to scavenge for supplies. They may be killed during their search, meaning you lose the survivor and whatever they are carrying with them. While conceptually this is a good idea, in execution they're useless since they don't get that many supplies and come back with 75% of their health gone whether you give them a weapon or not.
 * 6) Despite how many survivors you meet, you never fight any. The only thing you fight are Walkers, all of which are the same both mechanically and model-wise.
 * 7) The game isn't well optimized and buggy as it's prone to frame drops, ragdoll glitching, and one particular glitch on PC where the cursor will magnetically shift to random objects for no reason.
 * 8) The game tries to be a first-person shooter, a survival game, and a stealth game similar to The Last of Us which came out the same year. However, each of these aspects are terrible for various reasons.
 * 9) The stealth suffers from Rogue Warrior syndrome since you can sprint up to Walkers and they can't hear you.
 * 10) The survival aspect is barely existent since supplies are really easy to come across and Walkers are easy to avoid and kill.
 * 11) The game doesn't save your configuration forcing you to reset your graphics settings every time you launch the game.
 * 12) Awful graphics with the walkers looking like melted butter, character models having animations that look stiff, and it was inconsistent levels of detail, with some textures are very low resolution making it difficult to tell what the object you're looking at is, while others are higher resolution and actually look decent. When there are more enemies in the level, the framerate then drops to the lower twenties or more.
 * 13) *The Wii U version looks even worse, with downgraded visuals, and an even more unstable framerate often staying at 15 to 20 frames per second.
 * 14) Unrealistic and jarring material reactions with glass flying through walls and non metallic objects sounding like metal.
 * 15) False advertising: Despite claiming to focus on the Dixon brothers, Merle is absent for a good amount of the game. He shows up for 20 minutes, seemingly disappears, and then shows up at the very end. You don't even get to play as him.
 * 16) While the idea of choosing your routes is good, the game sometimes makes the choices pointless since you can just choose the route that takes up the least gas.
 * 17) The game is really easy. Walkers are really easy to avoid and kill because of BQ #11 and the fact that you can shove zombies and stealth kill them from behind.
 * 18) Because the game is so easy and nothing of intrigue happens due to the lack of a story, the game becomes really boring, really quickly.
 * 19) It can be beaten in less than 2 hours.
 * 20) Most of the locations are recycled and have no variety due to all the environments looking like generic city-landscapes with nothing that makes them stand out.
 * 21) The way weapons effect Walkers make no sense. For example, you can blow Walkers' heads up with a gun, but not blow them away with a shotgun or cut their heads off with things like an axe. All you do is smack them in the face no matter the melee weapon and when shot with a shotgun or rifle, they just stumble backwards.
 * 22) There is no level select feature meaning if you wanna play a certain level, you have to play the game all over again!
 * 23) You can only stab Walkers in the head by stealth killing them from behind, but not from the front. Well, you can, but you have to play an awful mini-game where you have to line up the cursor to their heads. It's worse on PC due to mouse sensitivity, proving this mechanic was made solely for controllers.
 * 24) There are collectibles like stuffed squirrels and wanted posters, but you get nothing for them.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Voice acting is alright, at least from Norman Reedus and Michael Rooker.
 * 2) The soundtrack is decent and fits the tone and mood of The Walking Dead.

Reception
The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct received extremely negative reviews for its broken gameplay mechanics, poor graphics and "bland" environments, a lack of meaningful storyline, and for not meeting the high expectations associated with its source material. On Metacritic, the Xbox 360 version holds an aggregate score of 32/100, a 34/100 for the PlayStation 3 version, and a 38/100 for the Windows version.

This game was featured on DX's "Worst Games of the Decade" video criticizing the lack of a real story, forgettable side characters, implementation of survival and stealth mechanics, and overall laziness from Terminal Reality.

Videos
4CbU2NIJgAY rC-HBQbeLgU j3JV3NIoUWU xLOtUnOl6Qg C1xeT2EmI-w