Zombies can be fun to mow down, but they also run the risk of being one of the least interesting monster enemy types around: a slow, lumbering, decaying husk that’s better off buried than occupying our attention. If nothing else, The Walking Dead: Destinies, based off the otherwise fantastic early seasons of the TV show, succeeds in embodying all their worst qualities. In its ugly, shuffling attempts to stand tall even while looking like rotting husk of a game from the Xbox 360 days, Destinies deserves neither your attention nor access to your wallet – and we would be better off if this boring mess had stayed buried in the past, from which it seems to have exhumed its broken mechanics. While it earns a small amount of credit for at least attempting to play with plots that diverge from the TV show, little else is done to elevate it above the muck of banal design, awful character models, and the laughable sense that this is barely a rough draft of a game.
Longtime fans of the TV show are clearly the target audience here, since the characters poorly mimic the visual likenesses of their real performers. But aside from trying to strike a chord through recognisability, Destinies presumes you know the entire melody as you’re unceremoniously thrown into the shoes of Rick Grimes after he wakes up in the hospital alone.
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It is here – right at the beginning of what became eight to nine painful hours – that everything falls apart.
The hospital is, naturally, filled with zombies and Rick must find his way out with some basic mechanics like pushing, sneaking, and healing that we’ve seen in essentially every third-person post-apocalyptic horror game ever, but worse. Zombies are, of course, mindless by design, but these are some of the most incompetent enemies you will encounter in any video game. Aside from there only being about three zombie models, they also get stuck in walls, glitch through the ceiling, collide with each other, and pose about as much threat as a wet sock on a carpet: annoying and unsightly, but otherwise forgettable.
Destinies is ugly as sin, with hideous character models, terrible lighting, and homely environments that themselves are re-used multiple times. I have been playing plenty of games out of my backlog from the Xbox 360 days on my Series X lately, and I can tell you this current-gen game looks worse than the nearly 20-year-old GTA IV.
The texture resolution reminds me of bad webcams we all endured during early COVID-19 Zoom calls. At the very least, the frame rate seemed consistent at 60fps on PS5, when it wasn’t crashing or failing to display its so-called cutscenes. I also hit several game-breaking bugs, one of which required a full restart. Also, during a boss fight, my character refused to interact with the enemy to initiate a cutscene. Not to mention sound and music would vanish for no reason, until I restarted.
Speaking of, the cutscenes themselves are consistent with those cheap-looking placeholder types we’ve seen in games like Redfall and Rise of Kong (which Destinies publisher GameMill was also behind). Characters are displayed in static poses while their voice actors deliver lines, giving you the opportunity to see their terrible designs in full glory. They are clearly meant to vaguely resemble their TV counterparts, but they look like what you’d get if you asked me to draw them from memory.
Strangely enough, the voice performances are actually not atrocious, but the actors didn’t have much to work with. For example, they all have one-liners when taking down enemies or fighting them off – “My blood’s boiling!” “Get off me!” and so on – all of which repeat endlessly. In the context of a dangerous world of constant terror, hearing weird action movie one-liners from both an ex-cop and a 70-year-old farmer was jarring.
Destinies doesn’t even retell the show’s story well. For example, early on when Rick’s son Carl is shot, it is never explained who shot him, and no one seems to know or care. At all. In fact, Otis, the culprit in the show, never even appears in Destinies. Instead, the survivors simply grab the boy and run off to the Greene farm story arc that infamously slowed the series’ pace down.
The only thing Destinies has going for it is being able to play with the titular dynamic: the fates of its characters. There are many occasions where you must make a binary decision that leads to the death or abandonment of a survivor. If you know the show, it is of course enjoyable to make the decision that runs against the established plot. Most notably, you can basically recast the main character, choosing who wins the fight between Rick and Shane after they spend some time on the farm, letting Shane can take over as husband and father to Rick’s family. That’s a pretty dramatic, fundamental change!
It’s clear the developers had some love for the show, given the work put in to portraying Shane as we’ve never seen him. His hair and beard grow out, he forms relationships with characters he never met, and so on. Another good example of an impactful decision involves changing who becomes the final boss’s right-hand man, flowing from a decision you make in the first few hours. But, unfortunately, this is only interesting conceptually, since it still fails miserably in execution, and naturally most decisions do little to affect the actual plot.
The survivors move through different camp areas in their grand road trip, such as the previously mentioned farm and later a prison. These become hub areas where you do three things: start the next main and side missions, resolve a meaningless conflict between two characters, and “talk” to other survivors. And by talk, I mean each person will say one arbitrary, generic line whenever you go back to the hub area, offering no reflection on the events happening around them. For example, Rick’s wife Lori will tell the man who blew her husband’s brains out about how she enjoys making pancakes for the family on Sundays.
Each main mission usually sees you playing as a different survivor. Often this makes little sense, since you’re generally by yourself or playing as the worst person for the task at hand. For example, a few hours into Destinies, Lori gives birth in the prison – but a few minutes later you’re playing as her to recover items from a nearby department store. There were many other survivors who did not just endure a birth in a zombie apocalypse who could have gone, but sure, let’s send the new mother. No explanation is given. Another time, a 70-year-old farmer is sent – alone – to recover an assault rifle and ammo in the basement of the prison. You’re never told why someone who actually handles weapons – like a younger, more agile police officer, for instance – could not have gone instead, or at least accompanied the old farmer.
Destinies attempts to shake up the scenarios in its main quests, but they all come down to either getting to a specific part of the map or collecting items. Very rarely will two characters be together, assisting one another – which was a central focus of the entire show and its spinoffs. There was an opportunity to have one character make decisions that a second character would have to endure the consequences of, but Destinies does nothing with this.
In fact, it’s just not very good at consequences in general. The central and titular dynamic of Destinies is watching your choices define the lives of these survivors, but it doesn’t function well enough to maintain the illusion. More than once, I saw characters I had killed – deliberately or inadvertently – appear during cutscenes. Rick’s son, who died from a gunshot in my playthrough, was running from the farm in a static cutscene; Rick himself, who I had Shane kill, appeared for a solid few seconds battling the horde in the final fight. This may be a universe where the dead return from the grave, but I don’t think Destinies is doing it right.
Each survivor has various unique skills that can be upgraded by acquiring skill points, either through completing tasks or… finding radios, for some reason? For example, the pizza delivery guy can upgrade his sneaking movement speed to avoid conflict with zombies, or Rick’s revolver can do more damage. The skill tree is a massive eyesore, and ultimately meaningless – in the first two hours, I had already maxed it out for everyone.
Even fully upgraded, combat in Destinies is some of the worst you will experience, and feels as though it might’ve been lifted from shovelware of previous console generations. There is no kickback or feel to guns or melee weapons. Shooting is floaty and unresponsive, with terrible auto-lock that has you targeting enemies nowhere near you. Every character has the exact same set of moves, whether they are a fit hunter or a new mom. Characters can use a kind of super move when they’ve built enough “adrenaline”, which restores health and kills enemies instantly, but that also feels pointless when you’re fighting zombies that are so slow and die in two hits.
You do eventually begin to encounter tougher human enemies, but their armor and agility just means they are more irritating and take longer to kill. Oddly, they are also introduced out of nowhere and not spoken of at all. They first appear during Shane’s only flashback sequence to when he was trying to rescue Rick from the hospital – who are they? What do they want? Why are they attacking Shane? Sorry, you’ll never know if you haven’t watched the TV series. Shane himself never reacts to it.