Luigi’ Mansion 2 [Dark Moon] was the over-a-decade-long awaited sequel to the Gamecube cult classic. Having played the game when it came out, I loved every second of my playthrough. The dialogue was some of the best the Mario series put out, the ghost hunting was mechanically great, the Toads were very well implemented, the puzzle solving was almost too good for how simple Luigi’s skill set is, and aside from the first Polterpup mission and the fourth manor boss fight the game lacked any hard low points. Indeed, I cherish that playthrough and stand by this game was one of my favorite experiences on the 3DS without parallel.
This is also an extremely annoying game that I will never play again.
The game doesn’t quite qualify for an Awful Archive, especially since the game is more forgotten about than disliked at large. So instead, I shall simply go over my 5 biggest issues with this game.
Tutorials
All Talk, No Teaching
E. Gadd will call you up for every last little thing in the game, from how to tie your shoes to reminding you that cheese is a loaf of milk. For the first two manors, making any progress towards that mission’s objective will result in E. Gadd calling you up to congratulate you for not being dead and tell you what to do next. He’s not as bad as Olivia in this regard – his dialogue is both really good and skippable – but it doesn’t change that the calls themselves are not skippable. This means that for repeat playthroughs, the first third of the game is a pacing nightmare.
But on top of that, the tutorials aren’t really all that helpful. Only the absolute basics are covered in terms of what the player can do. Anything beyond the simple act of draining a ghost of their HP and aiming the vacuum is left to the player to figure out. The most egregious example is the jump dodge Luigi can perform when holding a ghost. Pressing B allows Luigi to jump to avoid damage at the cost of losing all of his suction combo, so there is a risk vs reward with this system… once the player realizes this is a mechanic. The game at no point tells the player this, and the only other means of dodging damage is to let a ghost drag Luigi out of range of an attack.
So the game effectively makes the first third a slog to get through for something that isn’t even that helpful at teaching new players how to be good at busting spooks. Lovely.
Missions
We’ll get ‘em next time.
The fact the game is divided into missions isn’t what I find so annoying. It’s how the game does this in a mansion that is clearly designed to be explored. All of the manors have decent exploration to them, but your really locked off until the last mission. Sounds like the first game, right? Well, not quite. First, imagine if it was just Area 1 over and over again, heading back every 20-30 minutes: That’s Luigi’s Mansion 2. And second, you have to remember this game is far more puzzle focused and animation heavy. So there’s a good chance each mission has what will feel like filler to waste a good minute or two as the player gets back to where they were.
That’s ignoring how some missions are blatant filler to begin with. The first manor has ghost ripping gears out of a device, so an entire mission is devoted to gathering the pieces back together. While I don’t mind the later polterpup missions, the first one is just chasing a dog through places you’ve already been with no real changes to them (the second time he appears requires you to use what learned in the first three levels to sneak up behind him, and the finale time is a unique location). And the third level devotes TWO whole missions to getting the elevator working.
What the mission structure hurts the most is exploration, and this can best be experienced in the dog house found in Gloomy Manor. In one mission, this dog house is crucial for progression. In the next, it’s needed for getting a collectible gemstone. In another mission, it offers a little bit of cash but can be easily ignored. In another still, it serves as the entry for the bonus game for that mission. And in yet another mission, it contains absolutely nothing and going back there is a complete waste of time. Basically, you’re exploring each mansion five times minimum to find everything, ten times practically since you’re not finding everything the first time, and possibly up to fifteen times if you’re really struggling with those mini-games, gems or gold ranks.
I wouldn’t mind the structure so much if it just wasn’t put into the context of a single connected location. If there were a good 25 different locations to explore, each the size of Area 2 or 3 from the first Luigi’s Mansion than I would take little issue with the streamlining effort. But as it stands, I never once felt like I was slowly unlocking and exploring the mansions, and it felt like I was constantly put into a play pin and told to just do things the way the game wanted me too.
Ranks
You Earn A Silver Medal
The Ranking system is pretty important to an entry in this series as it’s basically the only reward the player receives for putting in any extra effort beyond surviving the adventure. The first and third games simply reward you with a better mansion/hotel for ending the game with a lot of money, and the first game also gives you better picture frames for beating a ghost in one go or without getting too badly hurt. This game has money serve as a means to upgrade your gear (really cool addition, by the way; shame it didn’t return in 3), so you’re instead given a rank for each individual mission based on time, ghosts caught, damage taken, and gold earned.
The problem is that all four of these have a minimum requirement for gold to begin with on top of being weighed differently, and the game never tells you the exact thresholds to aim for. You found 80% of the cash in the level and took no damage? Sorry, there were 4 Greenies in the room behind the spawn point in the opposite direction and you took 2 minutes too long. Silver Medal. Oh, but the mission before this one required 600 gold so I hope you don’t think the problem was that you didn’t collect enough money.
I never went after the gold medals, and I never will.
Boos And Gems
Boo this man! Boooooo!
The Boos are a low point in every Luigi’s Mansion game. In the first game, they either pose no threat because their HP is so low, or their HP gets so high they become filler thanks to the game having three moments where the player is forced to go after enough of them. This game instead treats them as a collectible, with the player having to find something invisible in the level to use the Dark Light on them, revealing the Boo’s hiding place.
Honestly, I find this to be their least annoying implementation (they’re certainly nowhere near the afterthought they were in 3), but the only reward for catching all of them in a level is just another mission where you capture ghosts under a time limit. When you consider how out of the way most of these Boos are, and how King Boo is still the main bad guy, this is a complete let down for hunting his lackies down.
Not as much of a letdown as getting all the Gems, though. I do enjoy how well hidden these things are, but the game doesn’t do a good job at letting the player know which missions have which gemstones. Some can be found in every mission, but most only have one or two they can be grabbed in. They’re labelled in the order you find them in, sure, but you still have no way to know if the next gem you’re looking for is in this mission or if it marks when the next mission is required to get them. And your reward for spending hours looking for the color fish tank rocks? Statues.
It’s really underwhelming, especially since said statues are just Luigi in different poses. If anything, they just further highlight how pointless actually collecting everything in this game is. This, on top of the annoying mission structure, makes 100% completion more of a chore than a game.
Portrait Ghost
A Picture is worth 1000 words, and exactly one coin.
I’m not someone who is upset there’s no portrait ghosts in Dark Moon, and the ghosts of Evershade Valley have enough personality to carry the game. I also love how the Greenies adapt with new tactics throughout the game (they end up being the Golden Gliders, Purple Punchers, and Shy Guy Ghosts all rolled into one enemy). The downside is that only the Greenies get this variety. The closest to a runner up is the Poltergeists, but that’s because their ability to levitate things just has more to work with.
Since there’s only about eight ghosts in the whole game, the game has to rely heavily on mixing them together for interesting encounters. While it does a solid job of this, having a few more one-off ghosts like the Three Sisters would have been much appreciated. In fact, just having one of those per manor on top of the Possessors would have gone a long way. But as it stands, there’s not a lot of single encounters in the game that stick out in my mind beyond the boss fights themselves, even if the combat itself is really good.
To end this rant (in lack of a better phrase for it) on a positive note, all five of these issues were fixed in Luigi’s Mansion 3. E. Gadd didn’t call even two minutes for the first two hours, the mission structure was abandoned in favor of the hotel setup (which was a much better compromise between exploration and streamlining), the ranking system reverted back to the original game with the added temptation of spending money on extra lives or for help tracking collectibles, collecting all the Boos and Gems give some cute cosmetics for multiplayer mode, and the Hotel Staff fill the void left by the portrait ghosts on top of having the fantastic characterization Next Level Games is known for.
At the end of the day, Luigi’s Mansion 2 walked so Luigi’s Mansion 3 could run. Just as I will always value that first playthrough, Dark Moon provided a framework for one of my favorite Switch titles. But whenever I feel like revisiting Evershade Valley, I honestly just watch Chuggaconroy’s playthrough or BSC’s run.
I never really cared for the Walking Dead as an IP, as I find their approach to the undead to be limiting in the long term (the copout of “everyone is already infected and the bite just kills you via fever” on top of zombies being indestructible from the neck down makes my eyes roll like billiard balls), and the message that the evil of man is man is one of the few clichés that make me lose interest in a story. However, I somehow find the AMC show based on comic series to be even worse. On top of my issues with the source material, the plot line became absurdly repetitive (so many conflicts just occur because at the end of a season, the zombies break in, kill a dozen or so characters, and they need to escape and find a new sanctuary) and the show manages to rob the concept of anyone can die of most of its impact (head to YouTube and look up some videos comparing the deaths of characters in the comics and the deeper meaning behind those deaths, and then compare them to the tv show’s deaths).
So naturally, how could I not play the poorly received game that’s a prequel to the painfully over-hyped and underwhelming TV adaption of a comic I don’t really enjoy? And I certainly had no excuse when my cousins had the game for free and allowed me to play it while I was over. (That said, I paid for the copy I used to make this article).
I mentioned this in the Awful Archive for MindJack, but I have a good deal of experience with this one. With Angry Joe mentioning the game isn’t very good at all, and with my cousins having the game when I came over for a visit, my curiosity peaked. I stated back in that old A.A. that this game was more mediocre than terrible,
but now I can finally give the whole story as to why. Let’s start with the literal story.
Story
Much like ZombiU (not the last time this game is getting named dropped today), the actual plot of Survival Instincts is almost absurdly simple. Will Dixon is out hunting with his son and two friends (Daryl, Jess, and Buck respectively). Buck is quickly eaten, with Will being next and Jess getting bit. Act I Daryl and Jess head to find Merle (although Jess soon turns). Act II has Merle go after his biker gang that sold him out with Daryl being brought with him, and Act III sees Daryl head to an evacuation site with a woman named Anna “Scout” Turner.
The recap isn’t just me to trying to keep things brief, there really isn’t more to the story than that; most levels are simply just Daryl looking into something, trying to get something his current travel partner needs, or looking for a new ride on his way to that act’s ultimate goal. This is fine, in fact it’s very in-line with the borderline non-stories the AMC series has. This is because The Walking Dead in all forms specializes in character-driven stories; it’s very captivating to see a character draw the line on what they will or won’t do, push them over that line and see them try to survive the consequences of their actions or inactions.
If only the game had good characters.
The characters aren’t bad. The Dixon brothers are just inherently interesting characters with good contrast between each other, Jess’ death is in line with how the series would introduce the infection killing someone if it were to start here, and Scout would fit right in with the AMC show if this storyline were to happen in it. But Jess dies before you really get to know him, only a total of five characters appear in more than one level, and the survivor who actually accompanies you for the final level is an actual nobody. Scout has way more characterization and influence on Daryl as a character than Merle, is mostly reduced to radio chatter and his appearance in the game’s ending despite being heavily advertised as a key character.
Concept art for Scout. I wonder if she was going to be the playable character at one point; if there was going to be a point where the game didn’t directly use characters from the AMC TV series and instead just take place in the same universe.
Speaking of the game’s ending, the story doesn’t even do a good job at trying to lead into the show. The only things the game adds proper context to in the actual story itself is Daryl’s crossbow (it was a gift from Merle), and the red handkerchief he pockets in the show (Scout gave it to him after deciding to stay with her dying father instead of evacuating). There is a bit in the way of thematic ideas in the story, mostly in the why Daryl continues to stick with his pretty awful brother, but the series itself does a better job looking into that. Most of the other nods to the show are instead just echoing certain set pieces the show did in its first three seasons.
And most of the new characters get the job done but aren’t that special. Being a prequel with an original cast, everyone besides the Dixon brothers either die or go their own separate ways. This only becomes a problem because optional survivors don’t get dialogue in the levels you find them in, and since some survivors never get more than some basic exposition about themselves and a request to join them, you can expect to forget everything but their names and appearance when a level ends, regardless if you take them with you or not.
It’s not all bad, though. There’s moments when the game does manage to deliver some emotional hits. The biggest example that comes to mind is the level where Merle demands a new car out of paranoia of the military tracking him, and Daryl comes across an old woman in a drive-in movie theatre. She calls you to the projector room she’s holed up in, and offers her car in exchange for her cat from her house since [in her own words] she’s “done all the running she’s going to do in this life”. I can’t say there’s enough of these to make the adventure the tearjerker the fans of the series would expect (especially compared to Telltale’s first season of their Walking Dead game), but it’s enough to keep things engaging to the end.
I personally think the underwhelming story (and, if I may jump ahead, clearly rushed gameplay) can be attributed to Season 3’s looming release date at the time. Season 3 killed off Merle Dixon as the new villain of the show (The Governor) had him tied and infected, with Daryl mercy killing him. This means that Season 3 was the last time Merle would be as relevant and popular/hated as he was, and so this game had a best-before date in terms of the marketability of it’s leads. Just a theory on my part, but it’s a tragedy if true.
Presentation
The game’s visuals are great for a 2008 Xbox 360 title, but the game came out in 2013. Nothing looks unfinished, but textures are muddy across all platforms, my visual super villain bloom makes a return after being absent from the past few Awful Archives (although to a fairly harmless degree in this game’s defense), and most weapon sounds have a general stock feeling to them. Character models for survivors and zombies alike look solid with Walkers especially having some nice detail, but animations are limp (and in some cases even weightless) with facial animations being surprisingly inexpressive 90% of the time. If this game was motion-capped, nothing in the final product benefited from it.
If it was manually animated, then I’m left to wonder if the unconvincing movements came from the often unconvincing voice acting. I noticed characters like Warren, Scout, and Deputy Kessler had much better animations and also showed more emotional range in their voices, whereas characters with weaker vocal performances like Jimmy Blake would only get their more expressive animations when they stopped talking.
Norman Reedus and Micheal Rooker reprise their roles as the Dixon brothers, but it’s clear they are not used to voice acting. If you compare Daryl and Merle to their small screen counter-parts, there’s a lot of subtitles to their delivery that do not carry over into the game. This is likely just further proof that camera acting and voice acting are not 1-to-1 talents, since the body language that an actor can add to a performance (which can also help them keep their voice in tune with the tone of the scene or characters actions) is being done by an animator after the fact instead of by the actor themselves. Either way, it’s hard to ignore that Daryl sounds like he had his mid-morning nap interrupted for a good half of the game.
The music is where this game’s presentation gets a bit better. If the song isn’t directly lifted from the AMC show, it’s created to fit the general motifs that show uses. What really makes the music nice in the levels is the lack of it. That’s not a jab at the OST (I really like the travelling theme especially), but the game is a bit haunting as you go through the often silent locations, with the music only kicking in when walkers happen to set their sights on you. Basically, the game takes the Left 4 Dead approach and saves the music for when something the player needs to be aware of is happening.
Overall, the presentation is unimpressive but passable.
Gameplay
Compared to most survival games, and especially zombie survival first-person games, the biggest surprise gameplay wise in Survival instinct is that the game isn’t open world but instead level-based. As someone who is fairly unamused by most open world games, I’m glad this was the route they ended up going with.
The story levels (known as marked destinations) fall into two categories: linear levels where the player simply goes from point A to point B, and looping levels where the player heads into the level to accomplish an objective and then return to the starting point. The drive-in level mentioned earlier is the sole except in that it combines these two designs in that point A to B is literally just 60 seconds away, so the player simply has to go there and back twice to finish the stage. There are also scavenge levels in between main levels, but I’ll get to those when talking about resource management.
The game’s usage of invisible walls is a bit overblown in Angry Joe’s review, as only a handful of levels make use of them to keep you on route. Most stages instead play with elevation or simply unlock a previously locked door at the start of the level to have the player loop back around more naturally. Of course, invisible walls or not, most levels are pretty short if you don’t die, and the fact that every objective serves as a checkpoint makes dying much less of an issue. The short run time is also not something I’d consider a bad thing. The game is very arcade-like in its gameplay, and it’s unlockables make it clear the game is meant to be played multiple times.
So yeah, I did not experience most of the level design issues others had in this regard. Gameplay balance, on the other hand…
Well, the game had an uphill battle from the start. Because walkers can only be killed via a headshot and are literally immortal otherwise, the game can’t follow traditional zombie-vidya conventions. EVERY gun has to be able to kill with a headshot, but [unlike the comic of tv series] melee weapons need to take multiple swings to kill a zombie or be slow in doing so in order to give guns any value at all. This also means that enemy variety is non-existent; there are no human enemies (I don’t think the game’s engine could handle proper human combat tbh), the ties to the IP means they’re no mutant zombies of any kind, and something as simple as giving zombies helmets to protect them from damage would make balancing even more of a nightmare than it already is.
So with that in mind, the game does have some (on paper) good choices for weapon balance. Melee weapons come with two man stats. Their damage type determines if they specialize in speed (bladed weapons) or knockback (blunt weapons), while their size determines how pronounced that effect is on top of their damage output and reach. With a headshot from any gun being an instant kill, firearms are balanced through accuracy, clip size, and rate of fire.
Sadly, the weapon balance falls in on itself due to some weapons being clear winners.
The small melee weapons are functionally worthless, with their stat difference being ignorable, and the hunting knife (which is always equipped and does not take up inventory) does the same damage and attacks just as fast. The baseball bat can stunlock zombies, which should help with hordes, but Daryl is at such a disadvantage when he gets surrounded that it can never be utilized in a unique manner beyond that of the lead pipe.
The lead pipe is already the best melee weapon for the first half of the game, since it can stun zombies long enough to follow up with a charged attack to kill them (something the machete, it’s bladed counterpart, can’t do as reliably). During the second half of the game, you can find a fire ax that can kill with two normal attacks and will instantly kill with its charge attack, so the fire ax is basically a better version of the sledge hammer (which ONLY has the instant kill charge attack).
In terms of guns, only the two rifles are balanced very well. The bolt action rifle has the best range of any gun but needs to reload every shot, while the military rifle holds ten shots for rapid fire but has more limited range. The pistols are all outclassed by the fast-action handgun, as the accuracy of the revolver or the hi-powered pistol do not compare to the ability to hold 12 bullets at once in a weapon type you’re only going to use at medium range. Similarly, the pellet coverage of the double barrel shotgun or the speed of the six-shot semi-auto shotgun will never be as useful as having a pump-action shotgun with eight shells to delete whatever is marching towards you.
And then there’s Daryl’s crossbow. The game locks this until you reach Act III, and for good reason: it utterly breaks the game. You can snipe silently from a distance, retrieve your ammo even if you miss (whereas ZombiU would shatter the arrow if you didn’t land the shot), it’s ammo is fairly common in scavenge levels (you can even find bolts in levels before getting the crossbow itself).
On the opposite end of the scale, throwing items/weapons are useless in most situations. Hand grenades only work on large groups of walkers clumped together while still being a safe distance away from you, and at that point you should really just sneak around them since the explosion will just attract more walkers to your location anyway. Glass bottles and throwing flares only work if the walker hasn’t seen you yet, so you can’t just throw a flare to get a promised escape and neither weapon is very reliable in terms of how many infected will be distracted anyway. And they don’t even stack that high to boot, meaning having a good supply of these for more than one level just isn’t happening.
The one form of balancing the game gets right is healing. There are two recovery items in the game: sports drinks and commercial MREs. Sport Drink recovers ~30% of Daryl’s health while an MRE recovers about half, but a drink will also completely recover Daryl’s stamina. Do you stack up on sports drinks for minor healing and being able to bypass the stamina system in a pinch, carry a means to fully heal yourself in case a fight goes south, or have both on hand at the cost of a fifth of your inventory?
This is from the telltale game, by the way. The actual MREs in the game are just bland looking white bags of what could liberally be called “food”
This game’s inventory management as a whole is more involved than the standard survival game. Daryl’s base ten inventory slots can never be upgraded [even with new game plus unlocks], but the game at least allows the knife and the crossbow to not count against those ten spaces. Items you want to save can be stored in your car, with anywhere from 10 to 20 depending on the vehicle you’re driving. Your make and model will also determine how many survivors can join you and how quickly your fuel is used up.
Even the route you take between levels can affect your inventory, as which of the three routes you take will further affect your fuel usage and what types of stops you have: Scavenge levels (completely optional chances to gather supplies and can even have extra survivors), road blocks (can be driven around but costs extra fuel to do so), or breakdowns (mandatory fetch quests). What cars you find, as well as how often you’re forced to switch vehicles is affected by what story paths you take.
Now, the fact that these side levels tend to repeat with just different spawn points or enemy layouts isn’t that big of a deal, since these levels are rarely going to be played for more than 2-3 minutes before returning to the car and moving to the next destination. No, what actually hurts these is how pointless the different types actually are. The only difference between scavenging side levels and a roadblock/breakdown/gas shortage is just how truly “optional” the level is, as all unmarked destinations have supplies to be gathered.
What this means is that all four types of stops are actually scavenge opportunities, so there’s little difference in whether or not you take the back roads, main roads or highway. This makes gasoline a completely pointless resource since gas shortage missions will always spawn enough gas for you to make it to your next marked destination regardless of your travel method, and you need to run out of gas twice in a single roadtrip to game over. Sure, if you try to detour past a roadblock you might run out of fuel twice, but every roadblock is so pathetically easy that there’s no reason not to go in and spend the 90 seconds it takes to clear the path and run back.
If anything, gas just becomes a means to manipulate the system. Don’t like the side areas? Just stick to the highways and pick up gas at every breakdown for maximum distance. Need a few stops? Drop all of your gas at the end of the level to guarantee a stop without traveling anywhere, and then pick the backroads for your best chances.
If you’re still having terrible luck with the side level die rolls, you can send your survivors out to look for extra ammo, food, or fuel during the main levels. Sadly, this is rarely a worthwhile endeavor since how survivors gather supplies is horribly inefficient to begin with. When you send survivors out to gather supplies, they will find 1-3 pickups in the player-selected category. The problem with this is that the game never spawns items in high quantities stacked outside of scripted sections or side quest rewards. Since ammo is only randomly generated with 1-2 bullets per pick up, and you can’t tell survivors to look for ammo for a certain gun, searching for the precious metal is just never worth it; you’ll never get more ammo than how much you would get for dropping your gas for a promised scavenging opportunity.
I’ve already explained why actively gathering gas is worthless, so the only thing you can hope to be of worth is food. There’s only two healing items, both have their uses, and healing items are not guaranteed in scavenge levels. Unfortunately, even the clear best choice is a crapshoot. Survivors will always take damage when traveling, the risk meter only determines the odds of taking a lot of damage or making it back alive at all. You can lower the risk meter, but giving them the ideal weapons for them will only do a bit to lower the meter if they don’t have the “stealthy” stat. The only way to keep that meter constantly low is to send 3-4 survivors out at once. Only a few cars in the game can carry that many, and some levels have too many walkers for the risk level to drop below 50% anyway.
You want to keep that risk level low because the only way to heal survivors is with MREs (which is already a stupid restrictions), but survivors are barely healed by them. While it only takes two MREs to max heal Dixon, survivors will need FOUR to come back from minimal health! Since survivors will [at best] bring back 2 MREs and a sports drink back each, it’s very possible that healing survivors will drain you of more health than you’re getting back. Sure, I can just survive on sports drinks and reserve MREs for my survivors, but I’ve beaten this game several times over. For a first time player to basically cut out half of the healing items just to make sure their survivors come back alive is stupid. Outside of the relics you get for getting certain survivors to the end of the game alive, many players will find little use for them.
The tragedy of this is how easy it is to fix this. The game already has the option to not send survivors out and instead have them stay by the car. If staying by the car would regenerate the survivor’s health by about 50% (since, unlike Daryl, they don’t get a full health restore), it would instantly make scavenging for supplies a more worthwhile task for them since sending in at a high-risk percentage means you’ll need to give up a lot of MREs OR have to have the survivors sit out a scavenging opportunity.
The core inventory system, however, works just fine. Daryl’s ten slots are enough to have a constant set of options while still having that Resident Evil PS1 era of strict inventory management, and a more stick “survivor chest” in the form of the car forces players to actually think about what they might need vs what they just want in terms of supplies. Plus, ammo for all types, while scarce in the story levels, isn’t too hard to stack up in between locations, so [unlike the Last Of Us] the player can actually get a decent surplus of bullets if they resist firing their guns for a few levels.
So the game clearly has some fairly big balance issues, but nothing to make the game unbearable as others have said it to be. But then we get to the worst part of the game: the Walkers.
Just like the series it’s based on, firing a gun will attract every walker in the area to you. Pretty standard survival game trope, especially a zombie game in the 2010’s, but the all or nothing nature of the Walkers as enemies (headshot or miss shot) alone makes hordes far too dangerous to risk having. This is doubly true with most hordes having double digit numbers while the average firearm has a long reload and only holds six or so rounds. Unless you’re in a tight alleyway where you can turtleneck them into easy headshots or there’s a loud alarm that makes run and gun the only answer, firing your gun is often just a fast way to make a bad situation even worse. [This is also another reason sending survivors out for ammo is pointless, as if there needed to be another.]
Even if you kill every walker, the game just plain cheats. It L-O-V-E-S to respawn walkers you’ve already killed, and will do so regularly in levels that loop around. Did you kill every walker in the area before triggering the crescendo event? Don’t worry, we’ll just have six more walk out of trailer doors you couldn’t interact with. Have to climb back into the alley at the start of the level where you stealth killed the two zombies? Well, here’s three to occupy it. And you know how the gas generator is drawing them in? Yeah, we’re just going to respawn them once you kill them; after all, what’s a chase sequence when nothing is chasing you? And all of that is the first level.
Oh, and distraction items are worthless. Glass bottles only distract them for a few seconds, and they will go after you if they catch eye sight of ya on route to the impact location. Unlike in ZombiU, walkers will only go after flares if they haven’t seen you, so you can’t just throw a flare for a clean getaway and the limited attraction of flares makes it only useful for large clusters of zombies you can normally sneak around. And once the distracting effect ends on the bottle or the flare, you now have 4-7 zombos stalking an area you now have to avoid like the plague.
Walkers respawning in general makes using guns not worth it half the time, and just further encourages the player to cheese the horde whenever possible. There’s no point in using up a resource when you can easily and more safely achieve the same result by sneaking up behind a walker and executing it. You don’t even need to be crouching to do it, being behind the walker is enough. Simply walk up to one, shove it, get behind it before it can attack, and execute it. In cases of larger groups, simply stand on a car and kill them with your melee weapon (or better yet shoot them with your crossbow if you have it, since you can retrieve the bolts from a decent distance). It’s not hard to kill the zombies if you stop trying to play fair.
Although the walkers can also kill you very easily, too. Their slaps are far more dangerous than their bite. The bite attack starts with a grapple, and your health slowly drains as you fight them off until you manage to knife them in the head. Nearby zombies can join in, making the process take longer, but it can be a safe way to kill a horde of zombies without using any ammo and at minimal health loss if you’re good at the qte.
On the other hand, it only takes about 12-15 slaps to kill Daryl at full health, and while each walker has to wait a few seconds to skap again, getting hit causes the screen to blur and shoot upward for a second. This means getting hit makes aiming for the head near impossible for a second and if there’s more than one walker attacking you, getting combo swiped while you’re basically unable to retaliate. While I never can say I really got one-shot in this game, a group of four zombies can instantly wipe half of Daryl’s health. Given that the final section of the game has a moment where you have to defend a helicopter from taking a horde of zombies and several levels before will just throw ten of them at you and hope you saw the ladder you’re meant to climb to safety, most players can expect to unlock the secret achievement “You’re Doing It Wrong” despite playing as tactfully as possible.
It’s a shame too. Achievements and New Game Plus are handled better in this game than most others. The game has a wider variety of achievements than any other modern game covered in the archives thus far. From completion based one (meet every possible survivor, collect all the stuff squirrels) to gameplay challenges (beat a level with only firearms, a crossbow, or without killing a single walker) to just interacting with the game in ways the player normally wouldn’t (shoot ten crossbow bolts into a single walker, chop of an arm of a walker right as it’s trying to attack you). While I do wish the game had maybe one or two more fairly difficult achievements (like beating the game without once ever running out of gas), I did have fun getting most of them. And then there’s the relics.
This site is where this image comes from; I don’t know if this is concept art or custom art based on the icons, since the colors are a bit different.
These are not tied to achievements in any way, shape, or form. Instead, the player unlocks some new game plus rewards depending on which survivors were with Daryl when the player beats the game. While some of these relics are clearly better than others (the relic you get for simply beating the game is more of a game changer than most of the survivor based ones), none of them are bad. A few of them can even fix some of the game’s balance issues (Survivor Success makes survivor scavenging profitable enough to be worth doing, item boost increases the usefulness of distraction items and allows everything to stack higher,, and the increased health relic counters the stupid amount of damage walkers can do). While the player can only equip one per run, most will find revisits with relics to be more enjoyable than the initial playthrough.
These relics are also the reason I find myself revisiting the game from time to time. Simply equipping one of the mild relics to counter an annoying element of the gameplay is enough to make the game a rough but enjoyable run. But they also highlight how this is one of the more tragic games covered on Awful Archives. In some many ways the game is close to being good, or at least good enough. While issues relating to the IP never stood a chance (the story was never going to give any must need information since the show can’t just assumed people played the game), just some simply things like letting survivors give the player more supplies, not respawning walkers as liberally as they do and giving gas some kind of use beyond the car (like survivor trading spots as random on-the-road encounters where you exchange gas for other supplies) would have at least pushed the game to having a niche.
What hurts even more in hindsight is this was among the last classic license games to come out. After 2013, games based on pre-existing IPs from other mediums moved over to mobile to either make gotcha trash or be another clash of clans ripoff. And as the last of its kind, the Walking Dead Survival instinct showcased what was fairly common for them. Some ambition and effort clearly went into it, and some may enjoy it more than others, but it was never given the time or resources it needed and likely never was going to. What could have been a cult classic with a devoted fan base is instead a painfully unpolished game that often gets as brain dead as the walkers themselves.
But seeing how I would call this game a guilty pleasure of mine, your mileage may vary. Especially if your travel vehicle is the Sedan.
I wasn’t expecting to make something like this, but my projects are taking longer than I expect/wanted, and I want to avoid going silent months on end here. So here are some quick lists of things I plan to do here:
Awful Archives
Here’s a proper list of Archives to come this year – preferably getting these four done before the summer.
YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG – I’m grateful for my friend buying me this game and saving me the cash… but I’m really not looking forward to this one.
Pokémon Sword – I actually AM looking forward to this one, although most of my friends on Discord probably won’t be excited for it.
Walking Dead: Survival Instinct – This one might be the next one. I’m very familiar to this one, in that I completed the game 100% two years ago and still have a copy.
Dead Rising 4 – Do I save this one for Christmas? I feel like I should, but I don’t know if I want to.
Game Pitches
Game Pitches are something I’ve wanted to do here ever since I revived this blog from the dead, and I have several ideas already done in spreadsheets (especially for Mario Sports Games; those are some of the most fun for write ups I find). The thing is, a spreadsheet is a great for keeping track of ideas as I explain them to friends but they don’t make for a great read on their own.
That’s the struggle Game Pitches have had here is just trying to make them digestible in the context of an article. Once I can figure out how to put these ideas into words without devolving into word salad vomit, I’ll start posting them.
Fire Emblem: Dragon’s End
I have never properly played a Fire Emblem game. I only have watched my friend Arti stream the games, but since he’s doing challenge runs he’s already played the games and as such is skipping the story. So I’m one of the few people who have a basic understanding of Fire Emblem’s gameplay without really knowing much about the stories these games have.
So another friend of mine (We call him Kirby, despite his constant attempts to change his user name) requested that I make a story for Fire Emblem without looking the stories of the previous games up. I accepted this challenge, and this is the current title I’m giving the “game.”
I was allowed to base it off of any Fire Emblem gameplay style. I’m personally leaning more on GBA Fire Emblem with an idea or two for monetary-like sections that aren’t as over barring (thinking of roaming conflict-free villages).
Either way, this is something that you will see at some point.
Sorry for nothing in March; I’m working to make April actually have something to show. Thanks for reading/following, and see you next time.
The Squid Chamber 