The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival

If you're a fan of the TV series or just love a solid, retro-style brawler, The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival is worth your time despite a few hiccups.

The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival is enjoyable especially if you're a fan of the show, however, combat can get repetitive and targeting is frustrating.

The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival is one of the better games based on The Walking Dead, being a side-scrolling beat 'em up with surprising RPG and adventure elements. It's just a shame that its combat feels a little basic in some areas, and its abundance of firearms can result in some frustration.

The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival isn’t a game I’ll be returning to over and over again. There simply isn’t enough mechanical depth or variety to make repeated playthroughs particularly compelling. But what it did do was remind me of one of Daryl’s old supply runs: get in, grab what you need, and get back out before you have time to overthink it. Streets of Survival isn’t particularly spectacular, but it’s short, straightforward, and easy to digest.

Streets of Survival is clearly not the best beat ’em up out there, but it’s not the worst Walking Dead game we’ve had either (Overkill’s The Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: Destinies have already been there...). The pixel art works really well here, and the different levels follow the story arc of the second half of Season 8 quite closely. So both old-school gamers and fans of the TV series will feel right at home. That said, both groups will probably be frustrated by how limited the game feels, with a campaign that can be completed in just three hours, as well as the publisher’s greed, with a simple endless mode locked behind a DLC that costs almost as much as the base game.

Despite being a fan of both The Walking Dead and the beat ‘em up genre, I can’t fully recommend Streets of Survival. It has a few standout moments, and I did enjoy wreaking havoc as Michonne, but the short 12-level, 3-hour campaign just isn’t unique enough to justify picking up any of the many better beat ‘em ups available.

The Walking Dead: Street of Survival features an appealing retro aesthetic, but falls short due to repetitive gameplay, a limited move set, and a lack of enemy variety. The narrative fails to capture the intensity of the TV series, the story mode is too short, and the game lacks replay value given its limited character selection and absence of co-op functionality.