The Walking Dead: Destinies

The Walking Dead: Destinies is an insult not only to the TV show it poorly attempts to emulate, but to modern gaming in general.

Publisher GameMill should be embarrassed at putting out The Walking Dead: Destinies at any price, let alone as a $50 boxed product, and we sincerely hope AMC Networks takes a bit more care in who it entrusts with its IP in the future. There's absolutely nothing here that has been executed well; it's a game that is simply rife with technical blunders, terrible production values, and broken mechanics. The only thing keeping Destinies from achieving a lower score is that you can at least play to the end credits, but even those have been fumbled. In a year filled with bonafide classics, Destinies is the worst game we've played.

Objectively speaking, The Walking Dead – Destinies is truly awful: mercilessly outdated technology, clunky animations, and gameplay mechanics that don't quite work as intended. Nevertheless, the game somehow managed to motivate me to play through to the end. Perhaps it's the same phenomenon I had with Escape From Bug Island on the Wii. Back then, the trashiness of the story kept me entertained, even though the game itself wasn't that great. Here, it's probably the similarity to the series that appealed to me. Although the choices you make do allow you to influence the course of the story to a certain extent. However, if you're not a die-hard fan of the series, I'd advise you to try it out first. Because I can't really recommend this title to anyone.

Yeah, this one is impossible to defend. The Walking Dead: Destinies is just truly bad. Granted, it might not be the worst game I’ve played in 2023, by a mile, but it’s a borderline charming exercise in incompetence. With poor combat mechanics, uninspired level design, and an enemy AI so (fittingly) brain-dead you can literally complete levels by simply walking by a horde of zombies, this game fails at being scary, tense, or even a great companion piece to The Walking Dead franchise.

The Walking Dead Destinies is a rather abysmal attempt at what’s actually an interesting concept, a situation releasing far too late for its intended era while playing like it would at that time.

The Walking Dead: Destinies is an incredibly disheartening journey into mediocrity and frustration, and I cannot recommend it to anyone.

GameMill Entertainment continues its run of rushed, cheap, utterly contemptuous scam jobs. Yet another game where you can see how the developers at one point hoped to make something good until reality hit them in the face, forcing them to spray some vomit onto storefronts and call it a day.

The Walking Dead: Destinies would have been a fitting release a decade ago during the peak of the series’ popularity, ironically, the game plays as if it belongs to that era too. You’ll quickly tire of the repetitive mission structure and grow frustrated with the combat system. Although the game claims to allow you to choose the path that Rick and Co. walk, your decisions barely make a difference. Even die-hard fans of the formidable franchise will want to steer clear of this undead adventure due to its dated design and poor execution.

It wouldn't surprise me if someone told me The Walking Dead: Destinies was put together in a matter of weeks. Nothing about this game works, and every inch of it is weighed down by significant issues. It's incredibly barebones and shallow, which is made worse by the fact that even in the execution of its utterly straightforward and simplistic ideas, it fails in spectacular fashion. Worst of all, it does absolutely nothing with its intriguing central hook. This may very well be the worst game of 2023.