The Walking Dead: Destinies

My first instinct when I saw the pitch for Destinies was genuine curiosity. A choice-driven action game covering the first four seasons of The Walking Dead, letting you swap out who lives and who dies, redirect the Governor, maybe even axe Carl early? On paper, that is a concept worth exploring. Then the game started, and any goodwill burned off faster than a walker in the Georgia sun. The core loop is a third-person action slog across familiar locations: the hospital where Rick wakes from his coma, Herschel's farm, the prison, Woodbury. You fight through waves of walkers using a mix of melee weapons like bats and katanas alongside ranged options including revolvers and shotguns. The stealth system exists on paper: Alarm Walkers screech when they spot you, Heavy Walkers soak up damage and charge. In practice, the enemy AI is so vacant that you can dodge-roll through entire hordes without engaging. The combat never builds tension because the opponents barely register your presence unless you stand directly in front of them. The character roster pulls in Rick, Shane, Daryl, Michonne, Carol, Glenn, and others, each tied to a skill tree that closes off permanently if you let that character die. It is the one mechanic with some ingenuity behind it: kill Carl, and his skill upgrades lock for good, though anything already purchased carries over. The so-called Defining Choices, which are the game's headline feature, turn out to be largely cosmetic. The major story beats of the show play out regardless of who you kept alive. The game quietly refers to contested leadership roles as "The Leader" in its story text, a transparent workaround for branching writing that clearly never got written. Cutscenes are mostly static image slideshows with voiceover, not actual cinematics. Visually, Destinies looks like something that missed its intended release window by about a decade. Character models are rough, animations are stiff and desync during executions, and the PC version launched without meaningful graphics settings. Some returning voice actors from the show are present, and the licensed soundtrack is serviceable, but neither rescues a product that is otherwise broken in ways that feel foundational rather than patchable. Bugs that prevent mission progress, physics going off-script mid-fight, and frame-rate inconsistency were all reported at launch and remained a topic in player feedback well after release. If you love the AMC series and want any Walking Dead game rooted in the TV timeline rather than the Telltale continuity, the appetite for this thing is understandable. But Destinies does not earn that goodwill. The concept had legs. The execution did not.

Alex · Scout Team

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