Developer Survios' The Walking Dead Onslaught puts players in the shoes of some of their favorite The Walking Dead characters as they fight for their lives in this combat focused survival game. Survios uses its VR experience to craft a solid looking and sounding game, but the end result is dreadfully boring and poorly balanced. The Walking Dead Onslaught mostly feels like two different games, with its Daryl-centric story and supply run side missions tacked on, and the game ultimately suffers.
The biggest upside to The Walking Dead Onslaught is that since Survios is an expert on VR video games, the accessibility and comfort of the game is top-notch. Players are able to choose from multiple different walking and turning options that can negate a lot of the ill effects that some experience with VR. This, combined with excellent head and controller tracking, make for a technically well-produced experience.
Daryl's storyline is also one of the higher points of The Walking Dead Onslaught. Players take control of the fan-favorite character, who is voiced by none other than Norman Reedus himself, as he recounts his efforts to save a young girl to the eternally exasperated Rick. The plot is set between the eighth and ninth seasons of the TV show, and gives a little more background on what the group was up to during this time gap. It's fun to see a whole story from Daryl's perspective completely unrestrained by Rick's constant moral superiority, but sadly, the narrative doesn't wind up going anywhere new or different for the property as a whole, instead retreading a lot of similar beats to the television series.
The Walking Dead Onslaught is almost entirely focused on its combat. Players are able to use a wide array of different melee weapons and firearms to eliminate zombies, but with the exception of the crossbow, all of the firearms are effectively useless. The basic pistol can sometimes take four or five head shots to actually kill a zombie, and the shotgun is a waste of inventory space, offering nothing that makes up for its ineffective execution. Melee weapons are the way to go, but the balancing issues between them and firearms makes the former feel dramatically overpowered. Even when a horde of 20 or more zombies is on screen, it's relatively simple to use the machete to chop them down in seconds with zero consequences.
While The Walking Dead Onslaught's story mode does a decent job of adding variety to its different levels, this is not true for the supply run missions that make up side content. Each new mission feels like a rehash of the same three levels, just with enemy and item placements moved around. This makes this section of the game quite boring, which is further exacerbated by the fact that players have no choice but to participate in supply runs if they want to complete the story. Rather than being able to play Daryl's quest to completion immediately, The Walking Dead Onslaught breaks the story up into seven different missions. In order to play each level, players have to collect a certain amount of supplies in the supply run missions first. This seems to be done as a way to pad the length of the game, which gets very frustrating.
There is an added The Walking Dead Onslaught progression system that is supposed to further inspire players to collect supplies, but it really just falls flat. Those supplies can be used to build buildings for Alexandria to gain buffs or upgrade weapons, but Onslaught is so easy that this isn't worth it. Those who want to make firearms more effective could technically upgrade them when they get a chance, but what is the point in having an upgraded pistol if the katana is a better weapon in its base form?
The Walking Dead Onslaught isn't necessarily a terrible game - it just doesn't offer anything exciting to either VR or The Walking Dead. It feels like a very safe and risk-free game that was built to cash in on the subject material's popularity. Additionally, the fact that it is coming hot on the heels of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, which is vastly superior, draws far too much attention to how uninspired The Walking Dead: Onslaught feels as a whole.
The Walking Dead Onslaught is available on PC and PlayStation 4. A PlayStation 4 code was provided for the purposes of this review.