The Walking Zombie 2 Review

The Walking Zombie 2 tells the story of a protagonist, dubbed the Chosen One/The Hero, who was born in a middle of a zombie apocalypse from a mother who was bitten by a zombie. Thanks to this unfortunate scenario, The Hero is now immune to the zombie virus meaning he can’t be turned into a zombie. The Chosen One is the only hope and will need to complete tasks and a plethora of side quests in order to save his fellow survivors.

The Walking Zombie 2 is a first-person, RPG-lite survival horror game. Think of an indie take on Fallout mixed with zombies. While there’s a main quest to follow, you’ll be able to attempt side-quests to earn additional experience points and in-game currency to upgrade your character perks and buy items to help you through your adventures. Once you complete the main quest of a city, the map opens up and you can go help other NPCs in a different area of the map.

The game has a fun and straightforward of going about things. So while similar RPGs will have characters spend hours walking about from one area to another, thanks to the game’s map, you can instantly get to where you need to go. While the character “moves” from the home base to the quest area, you can encounter random encounters where you’ll need to survive enemies. Also when your objective is complete, you can almost instantly return to the base; avoiding backtracking.

It also offers a decent quest variety; whether it be to simply find a secret entrance to find the proper entrance to a secret lab, no two quests will be identical. They can also vary from two minutes to ten minutes, depending on what you have to do. Some quests have a structure where you need to investigate an area for a specific objective, then kill X amount of zombies, move on to the next area, etc. Interestingly enough, when you’re investigating or fixing things, it works like King of the Hill in a multiplayer game; stand in the circle until the meter reaches 100% and you can still defend yourself.

The game also has a Karma system based on who you help. So if you help the saints by completing their missions and successfully accepting and conquering random encounters, you’ll be heading through good karma, however, if you complete underground missions and help bad guys, you’ll be walking into the Bad Karma path. Karma will affect random encounters and conversations/conversational choices with various NPCs and quest givers.

And if you feel like the main quest and side-quests aren’t enough, each city has an NPC that will offer a set of time quests for players to attempt each with a varying level of difficulty; the higher the difficulty, the better the reward. Some quests will also reward players with bonuses such as triple coins. These quests are refreshed every day.

Also, each time you level up, alongside XP and currency, the game offers additional rewards to be in claimed in the pause. And while there’s a shop where you can buy new weapons and helpful items, you can also acquire new weaponry in the shop available in the menu. A new available weapon to buy changes every so often, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on it. The Trader shop’s inventory is refreshed every so often but weapons are incredibly expensive.

To make a better character, there are a ton of skills that can be upgraded thanks to acquiring skill points. You can work on your speech, usage of melee weapons, defense, health, lockpicking, and outdoorsman; just to name a few. It can also be beneficial to work on all of them as, for example, some conversational choices can’t be selected unless you reach a specific speech level. The game also offers Perks. Every 3 level you level up, you are rewarded with a perk point that can be used to unlock things such as Scavenger (increased money when selling scrap), Random Skill (Adds 10 points to a random skill), Animal Language (being able to talk with some animals); just to name a few. Both skills and perks will give players a lot of flexibility as to how to develop the protagonist.

The game does look great with its unique modern polygon graphics style; which is a bit reminiscent of Minecraft to a certain extent. It also offers a decent enemy variety and NPC character model. For some ungodly reason, someone decided to have a Donald Trump look-a-like as the mayor of one of the areas, so that’s questionable. Towns and areas do look distinct from one another, layout-wise, as some assets are clearly reused (obviously). The soundtrack isn’t very deep, although the core theme playing throughout your gaming experience is incredibly creepy giving the game a real last-hope kind of experience; it somehow reminded me of the Night of the Living Dead for some reason.

The game’s main problem is clearly the menu-ing. It uses a combination of both joysticks and basically, all other buttons which can sometimes lead to confusion and wrongful manipulation (for example, increasing a perk that you didn’t want to increase or wasting money on upgrading the wrong weapon). Also strangely enough, the game offers aim assist only when shooting from the hip instead of when aiming down, meaning aiming is technically useless given the enemies’ often random movement patterns as they can easily dodge shots at the last second.

The Walking Zombie 2 is a (late) surprise hidden gem that came out of the left field for me. This is definitely one of the best games I’ve played in the last five years. Aside from the overly complex and incredibly counter-intuitive ways to navigate through your pause menu (inventory, shop, character management, map), the rest of the experience is incredibly fun and addictive. Every time I’d boot it up to work on my review, I couldn’t put it down. Everything is so simple, straightforward forward, and streamlined. If you’re looking for a simple, yet complex, zombie-hunting experience, I highly recommend The Walking Zombie 2.