Overkill’s The Walking Dead was a bizarre child of Overkill and 505 Games, published by Starbreeze. It featured a four player co-op adventure that had you explore various fictional areas of Georgia as well as maintaining various safe zones and defending them from some of the more hostile residents and the dead.
Now, before we start, I should mention that Overkill’s The Walking Dead has been de-listed, and is currently incredibly difficult to find — some vendors who still have CD keys available are asking for astronomical prices for it. So, to have an actual look at the PC version today could set you back a pretty penny.
I decided to take on this game as a solo mission, as the servers are still up for some reason but after being reduced to mostly negative reviews it basically sits empty. I hadn’t done any research leading into this game but had heard a solo venture would be difficult, as it is tailored to having four people complete its missions.
Before I began I had to pick which character would be best, I ended up switching through a few characters but eventually settled on Maya (Purely because she had an SMG) over the other characters.
The first mission has you pitted against a number of enemies as you defend your camp, the game twitches you to set up defences and ward off the dead with guns and melee weapons but it was a very slow start and pretty much became a slow wave defence. I wasn’t particularly impressed, normally the first missions of a game would entice you to want to play more but its reputation had become very clear very quickly.
I half expected the game to be pretty much this, move from base to base, defend, gather resources, rinse and repeat but was surprised when I was met with a mission that actually was a proper level. With games like Payday on their roster this was the sort of thing I was hoping to find and it didn’t disappoint.
Hell or Highwater is a mission that has you attempt to recover a water purifier that was stolen from your hideout. The mission had me working my way through a densely populated town teeming with the dead and some living in hopes to recover what had been stolen. One mechanic of this sort of level was a noise symbol at the top of the screen which was ever present but I had no idea what it meant.
After very slowly trying to sneak past a large number of zombies I had eventually alerted a lot of them and needed to break out the big gun and shoot some. This soon served to be a big mistake because the meter at the top of the screen started to fill fast due to my gunshots, every burst of fire adding to the meter climbing higher and higher.
After some basic puzzles and a lot of zombies I had started to notice some of “The Family”, the faction that had stolen the water purifier, had set up defences and barricades to hinder my progress. I thought it best to try and stealthily approach them but most of the combat is clearly catered towards you having more people to fight with.
Once again the bullets started raining in between myself and The Family, the meter climbing higher and higher with every shot. A few shots in and I had met the first point on the sound meter, zombies started pouring into the level from every direction attacking the living indiscriminately. At first I thought this was a great opportunity for me to slip past and move on but noticed that the few humans left were shooting more and more and the meter continued to fill even more.
After doubling back and eliminating the rest of the humans I sprinted forward and had a few more similar encounters, the dead did not stop coming the entire time leading to an unrelenting battle trying to progress on my own. Eventually I came across the final point where the purifiers were being filled. I had almost completely filled the sound meter and the dead were engulfing the humans in the camp and trying to tear me to pieces.
After sprinting into the base and shooting a few of its occupants the meter had completely filled and I was in trouble, the zombies had pretty much cleared the camp minus a few men on the roof of the main building. I thought I was done for, the objective was to ferry parts of the purifier out of the shop Payday style with taking bags of money.
At first I thought it wouldn’t be so bad, I picked up the first piece and expected to just be able to take all of them and then realised it’s one piece per person. I hurried on top of a car and tried to figure out what to do, turns out you can drop the bag you’ve got so I left them on top of a truck and ran back into the building dodging and whacking zombies trying to stay alive.
After removingHaving removed all of the pieces I had to shoot a flare into the sky, thankfully it was where I had been hiding my bags as the zombies didn’t appear able to climb. Now in my head I was expecting the Payday helicopter to come, I was so focused on not dying that I had just accepted that this is what was going to happen. It was not what was going to happen.
I waited for about two minutes and a car popped up on the complete opposite side of where I was and required me to one by one ferry the pieces to it and not die, at this point the entire map was heaving with zombies and special zombies with armour or ones that exploded when approached so it was basically do or die.
I had about two magazines of ammo left in my very basic SMG so I saved it for the last piece, ran back and forth between my truck roof and the truck to get out and sprayed whatever I could down. The horde was absolutely ravenous and I barely made it out, after sitting in the exit part next to the truck it still took another five seconds to leave the mission leading to me getting battered and escaping with a slither of health remaining.
This was one mission, I imagine with four people this would have been an enjoyable experience that wouldn’t take too long, it took me a long time to get through this solo. Well over an hour later and I feel like I had just been through The Walking Dead equivalent of Vietnam and lived to tell the tale.
The following mission was another defence mission but this time against people and I think at this point I’d had enough for one day. I do plan on going back to it and seeing how far I can get on my own but it is certainly a difficult experience without others.
Overkill’s The Walking Dead really had some potential and I feel if they cut out the base management side and stuck the the Payday-esque missions it could have been a serious amount of co-op fun but with the slow breaks in it and some genuinely boring bits in between the missions it is no surprise why they pulled the plug early.
Originally the game was available on consoles and PC but is now quite hard to come across on PC with a CD key so you may have some luck trying to find a physical disk online if you want to give this a go yourself and if you do I would try and play with friends if possible at all as this is 100% built for co-op and is very difficult as a solo venture.
At this point of the article we’d normally link out to the Storefront where you can get a code for the game, however, as established earlier, we can’t… So, I guess that the article is over.
