Best Of

The Walking Dead: Season Two(7.7 hours): Now this is how you make a narrative game. "You shot my dick off!". Its hard to review this game without spoilers. There were several changes from season 1 to season 2 but only the visual ones were good. Character models improved a bunch as the outlining and shadings lines were dropped. A minimal approach was used that gave everything a cleaner appearance which in turn helped as the color pallet became brighter with greater contrast. In all visually the game is great to look at as a direct result of everything being easier to look at and differentiate. Now interaction was severally alter to, as it appears, be more in line with standard console design resulting in frustrating clicks attempting to click specific actions on an object or person due to the user only able to click on small icons attached to an action wheel where in the console universe you could lock the joystick on target and do a direction choice. I got over that as the game went but I would continue to miss click frequently. My biggest gripe in the design change being disallowing number selection of conversation choices. Why? You just made me click on everything because you moved to a 2x2 grind instead of a list. Poor game design because of budgeting choices.

I was invested in this season within the first 15 minutes of episode 1. The pacing is better, stronger use of QTE, and shorter episode lengths had me wanting to get home so I could play through an episode after work. This season I came in trying to kill everyone else. You continually get forced into groups and then can't leave no matter actions you take and here is where stories on rails get hung up. No matter how much you sway choices from one second to the next you always end up in the same spot, nothing every really changes. Season 1 I tried to pick sides and realized that didn't get me any where special, thus, I changed to be in it to win it. No points for second place baby! Once the ball really gets rolling in this season it stands out the designers main plot device is everything just being dicks ALL the time. "Oh thanks for being so understanding. Shut up you are just a kid and need to respect me!" As my inability to not play as a paragon increased I simply stopped responding to chat choices but it didn't seem to matter I was forced to like people and agree to plans. Hell characters started repeating information only I knew because I made sure not to tell them. The last two episodes I found places where I repeated lines because I had to agree despite in action or characters repeated lines to make things fit. So in the end everyone has to die. No one expects the little girl *POP**POP* MotherF*^&@# !

Games Completed: 109
Time: 5 weeks .42 hours

PS. Hit 5 weeks of unique game play, going to close out 1,000+ hours this year.