Most of the games you find on Steam from indie developers have been through varying lengths of Early Access. Just last year 7 Days to Die capped off the record for longest Early Access period, a whopping 11 years! Others are as short as 6 months. The Walking Trade, a new shop management + zombie FPS hybrid, is an unfortunate case of premature release.
What is there is surprisingly good, but that intrigue then gives all the more spotlight to the lack of content and variety. This is exactly the sort of game I’d be genuinely excited to say “Wait for 1.0!” but, alas, it’s apparently already there…
For a Synty-modelled genre hybrid, it’s surprisingly engaging
For the uninitiated, the Synty line of 3D models are the sort you find in Perfect Heist, Stolen Realm and other indies that want to realise a vision without the cost and time of custom modelling and rigging. This is no bad thing, as both of the examples above are solid games (With Perfect Heist even spawning an army of clones due to online buzz) and allow devs to explore new territory with minimal risk. But, despite that, it’s still an understandable assumption that a Synty game might be too close to “Asset Flip” to really be of interest.
Within 10 minutes of The Walking Trade, those assumptions were quashed.
You are set up with a shop, a hammer and some basic scavenging points: bins, trolleys and abandoned vehicles in the store car park. Nothing unexpected really happens, but then the first customer comes in. Not only do they have a custom model, which is nice, but they also offer to pay for your Unlabeled Food Can (delicious) in…batteries?
In true post-apocalypse style, money is out and “random household item we picked on a dartboard” is in! Although, to give The Walking Trade some credit, at least batteries have an inherent use and will — in a true apocalypse where manufacturing has shut down — create a finite standard for currency.
Little details and quirks in a small and empty playspace
Not only were the batteries plonked on the table, but before giving the customer the go-ahead I had to scan each battery through a charge checker. I hadn’t even considered that a customer could, in a world using batteries as currency, use discharged batteries as a way to short-change someone. Honestly I was thankful for the tutorial message forcing me to scan them for charge, as I definitely would’ve fallen for that. It was a neat bit of worldbuilding baked into the gameplay, and made me immediately more interested to see how else this apocalypse differed from others.
Only the next day, a customer came in and said “No way I’m bringing that many batteries to a place like this”. So, it wasn’t that the price was unfair for the item, but more that the store wasn’t safe and reputable enough for them to feel comfortable carrying that much currency to the shop. This paints a picture that these customers really are travelling to and from your shop through the apocalypse, instead of just spawning on the car park boundary. It’s a small detail, but one that after the battery-charge-check system did make me smile in appreciation of effective world-building.
Established systems with nothing to use them on
Unfortunately, the stellar job that The Walking Trade did at setting the scene and getting me engaged was then wasted. As much as I did enjoy the initial progression and getting a roster of staff members to scavenge different locales for both story-related and sellable items, I felt like the potential was not being realised. For example, there’s skill trees for service, survival, management and crafting, and while they do have some impactful upgrades, just like the world-building, these systems don’t lead anywhere.
The biggest crescendo of these interwoven management, crafting and combat systems are “Raids” which feature waves of zombies, explosive zombies and bigger-with-more-HP zombies. This whole battle took place in the same car park I’d spent the last in-game week, and the zombies didn’t feel dangerous enough to keep me feeling pressure to upgrade myself or my shop. I couldn’t place wrecked cars as barricades, I couldn’t retreat from room-to-room in my store desperately healing before they broke down the next door…all I could do was stand in the car park wailing on pretty useless mobs.
Without pressure, without threat, the game just couldn’t hold my interest.
A successful combination of two different genres that needs more meat on its bones
It does provide some fantastic moments, such as manually dragging zombie corpses from your store and choosing between keeping their loot to use yourself, or listing it for sale. Both these elements help make zombie engagements fit seamlessly into the shopkeeping gameplay as you balance your own equipment with the potential profit of selling it all off. It doesn’t feel like two separate games, it feels like one cohesive experience, which is a fine achievement.
Friendly fire existing also makes the simple combat more demanding, and gives you a reason to hire Defender staff members who won’t accidentally shoot a customer in the face at point blank range (It’s okay really, I only lost 4% of our reputation for that incident).
Wait for full relea- Oh, right
Overall, it’s a real shame that the game couldn’t keep the content coming after an incredibly promising introduction. Being confined to a single car park, with the rest of reality only visible on a map screen, is just a little too simple compared to the potential of scavenging and crafting systems. I can picture a game where I leave someone looking after the store while I scavenge, or I have to arrange wrecked cars in the car park to create a fun zombie-impeding maze for raid nights, and during all of this I’d be utilising my skill trees fully. As it stands it’s like a restaurant giving you chef-grade cutlery to eat a microwave meal. Sure, microwave meals get the job done, but it still feels like a waste to use such great tools for such a simple dish.
The Walking Trade is available now on Steam
