The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival Review

The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival is a beat’em up based on the All Out War storyline, covered in Season 8 of the TV show, that reimagines the Saviors conflict adapted for a videogame. For those uninitiated, such as myself, this story arc covers the conflict between Rick Grimes’ Militia group and Negan’s Saviors group.

As mentioned, The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival is a beat’em up where players will jump into levels inspired by the TV show/comic where you’ll take on both zombies and human enemies to reach the end of each area, take down a big baddie and then move on to the next level. Each level will feature one of three (plus unlockable) characters: Rick Grimes, Darryl Dixon and Michonne. The other character will participate in moving the story forward, but won’t assist you in battle.

Our protagonists can also run, duck, roll over and jump over certain obstacles. In order to defend yourself, you’ll be able to switch between your fists and long range weapons such as Rick’s pistol or Darryl’s crossbow. Of course, both have limited ammo so you’ll need to scour every nook and cranny to replenish your bullets or arrows.

They can also defend themselves in a myriad of ways. Along with default melee attacks, you can kick enemies away to create some distance, pull off a simplistic combo by precisely pressing X-X-X-Y. Otherwise, Y just kicks. You can also pick up melee weapons such as axes, machetes, sledgehammers; all of which will break after a few uses. Also once you’ve survived the story, you can jump in a challenging Survival mode… which is exclusive to the Deluxe edition.

As you kill enemies and earn points, you’ll be able to unlock new skills and upgrades for the characters such as Adrenaline which allows our heroes to unleash power attacks when the meter is full or start with more health packs. To encourage players to explore, you’ll also be to find collectibles and easter eggs scattered across each level.

The game looks great; definitely its strong point. It features a 16-bit pixelated visuals akin to the SNES era; sprites are quite detailed and the variety of zombies is decent. More imposing figures have a high level of detail due to their size. Thankfully each level has a unique layout and subtle hidden areas for you to explore. The soundtrack is dark and tense; but quite forgettable.

This game has its share of issues. First off, Survival mode is locked to the deluxe edition for some reason. Second of all it’s as slow as walking in molasse and each level feels like they take 30 minutes to finish. While this occured to me a few times, I can’t be the only one, but the game has severe save issues. After crashing at the end of a level, the game hadn’t saved and I was thrown four levels back, including two of the worst levels of all time. And characters have unlimited stamina to run, but not enough to roll or kick more than once? Make it make sense.

And then I downloaded the game on a different Xbox Series console so I could continue playing and again the game hadn’t saved after clearing the same last two levels meaning I was forced to replay them for a THIRD time. And these levels were so slow and boring, I would’ve rather watch paint dry. Also using the joystick for movement feels off for a beat’em up. When enemies shoot at you, you don’t even need to be in their immediate line of sight to shoot you; if you’re in front of them, you’re screwed. Even if they are at the bottom of the screen while you’re at the top, you still get hit.

The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival is a pretty mid run of the mill beat’em up that feels a bit slow, outdated and 10 years too late. I really did try to like this, but the issues kept killing my enjoyment. This game should’ve released about 8-10 years ago during the peak of the franchise. While the upgrade mechanics are a nice touch to the genre, there’s really no reason to buy this. There are so many better, more fluid beat’em ups than this. Unless you’re a die-head fan of The Walking Dead or you must play every beat’em up in existence, this is an easy pass.