The Walking Dead Social Game for Facebook review

There are very few Facebook games that I personally can get into. I only played Farmville because my friends and family pestered me to. The other 'ville games got played for maybe five minutes before I got bored with them. So when I heard that Walking Dead (which I love in all its incarnations) was coming out with a social game for Facebook, I was less than thrilled.

But that was until I actually played the game. And right from the start, you get to jump into the zombie killing action. The first few missions are teaching missions (as most games tend to do) and are pretty simple. But once you get a bit further into the story, the missions become more complex, requiring a player to look ahead before they move their character into situations.

The story starts off before season one of the show or the first comic book starts. It follows the Atlanta group while they are building their camp. You as the player are responsible for keeping the camp running and the walkers at bay.

The items you can get as extras (especially the ones from the show) make game play much more interesting. Pick a silent weapon (such as an ax or knife) and sneak up on zombies, or pick a rifle and shoot them from a distance but run the risk of attracting them as well. Or, as I did early on, get one of the special items (I chose Daryl's crossbow) and do a little of both.

You also gain companions as you go along, however I tend to stick to the first one I got because he proved to have the most useful stats among them all. Each character's usefulness is determined by how many points s/he has in each stat (strength, stamina, movement, striking, shooting). As you use characters, they receive stat points for you to distribute. And the main character gets extra points when you level up.

It is rather frustrating that the number of energy points (required for missions) you can potentially have never increases. So no matter how high your level gets, you can still only do a certain number of missions a day. It takes a long time to get through everything, and you need to replay missions repeatedly in order to get 'stars' on them. And the number of stars determines whether or not you can move on to the next section of missions. You can be stuck for days replaying the same missions because you do not have enough stars to move on.

Also, like all the other games, most of the extras take too long to get, so the temptation to buy things is always there. And since that is the simple way to deal with things like low ammo and having the wrong weapon, many players might just throw money into the game. Personally, I don't think it's worth it.

So while I think that this is one of the better games that FB has for members, the drawbacks are still there. And while most people would think them not that big of a deal, they are a deterrent to my repeated playing.
/ [Flisky]

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