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When I first read The Walking Dead, it hit me like a freight train. The comic was then around 50 issues in (it's recently topped 100 and counting). Its unblinking black-and-white style was one thing, but its take on the zombie apocalypse was an original take on a genre that then, as now, feels like a setting deadened through repetition. Even today, its gritty melodrama feels fresh, one of those few creations that transcends an often trashy genre - the reason it ended up as primetime TV.The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is what comes, with sad inevitability, alongside such an achievement. It's a low-budget tie-in, just like the bad old days. Developer Terminal Reality's previous work includes 2009's decent-ish Ghostbusters, which despite leaden moments showed a real affinity for the material, and last year's Kinect Star Wars, which we'll pass over without comment. Such a catalogue suggests we might expect Survival Instinct to handle the license with some sensitivity, but this is a forlorn hope. The biggest determining factor in Survival Instinct's final form is one word and a whole lot of change: budget. This is a shoestring production, and it feels like one carried out at double-time then stitched together at the last minute. The best you can say is that it has big ideas but never realises them.
The game is a prequel to the TV show and casts you as the charmless hillbilly Daryl Dixon, whose most distinctive trait is calling female zombies "d***head" as he stabs them. Your mission is to stealth-and-shoot through levels that are basically large corridors - which could of course describe many first-person shooters. But while the better examples of this design do a good job of hiding it, in Survival Instinct, you're constantly running into invisible walls and knee-high obstacles. The cut-off points for levels are also invisible, and will simply fade the screen to black then respawn your character facing the other way. This isn't just bargain-basement design, it's uncaring.
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