The Escapists: The Walking Dead Released For Linux, Here’s What I Think

The Escapists isn’t a game I’ve played before, since the first game isn’t on Linux (yet), but The Escapists: The Walking Dead is now on Linux and our friends at GOG sent me a key.

About the game
Merging the smash hit indie game The Escapists with the world wide phenomenon that is The Walking Dead, Team17 have taken the very best of both worlds and are now providing players with the opportunity to play Rick Grimes as he takes on hordes of walkers let loose upon the world.

Rick is in charge of a band of survivors featuring many of the original comic book cast, including Maggie, Hershel, Glenn and Michonne. Rick must secure the safety of the group by seeking out a safe escape route from each area, and manage several dangerous tasks to keep as many of the group alive as possible. The game faithfully matches the timeline of the comics, meaning Rick must first fight his way out of the Harrison Memorial Hospital, visit the Greene family farm before visiting destinations such as the Meriwether Correctional Facility and Woodbury.

My thoughts
I’m a huge fan of The Walking Dead, as I imagine a lot of our visitors also are, so to have a game set in that universe is on Linux is just awesome. This is what I love about where Linux is now, to get games based on franchises we love.

I was initially quite impressed with the game, and I don’t generally like heavily pixelated games, but I found this quite charming looks wise. I think most fans of The Walking Dead will appreciate playing it through, and it starts off very much like the TV series.

It’s quite weird though, as once you reach the farm (second level) you end up doing a good few mundane tasks like washing laundry to keep zombie levels down, and attending breakfast to keep energy levels up. Once you get past that initial part though things do get more interesting, as you can lead people to different places, equip your survivors with weapons and go about your business. You repeatedly need to do mundane junk like washing laundry each day, but if you’re quick enough about the levels you won’t have to do stuff like that very often. Time goes quickly though, so any amount of scouting can force you into another day.

I decided to open the barn that was full of walkers quite early on, and this turned out to be a pretty poor decision on my part. I was armed with a pistol that had only a few bullets, and I soon got overwhelmed and eaten—crap. Even if I had escaped, the walkers still ate poor Hershel, so I couldn’t continue anyway.

One thing that is slightly annoying, is I don’t seem to be able to save the game so I either have to play through the level I am on, or quit and start again another time. It looks like it has one, since there's a resume option, but it hasn't told me how I go about saving, it must be something in-game, as there's no manual save option. You know me by now, I hate save systems that don't let me save when I want to.

There’s a lot to do in the game, as you not only have the main story to go through, but you are given quests from various members of your group too, like finding an item, or recovering an item stolen by a walker. It’s pretty cool, as it has a basic RPG feel to it, and I like that mechanic a lot as it makes the game feel bigger. Having quests to do isn’t as fun as it sounds, as the more quests you do the longer you will see the days pass and have to repeat the annoying tasks I mentioned before. Quests actually get in the way of the follower system too, as if a survivor has a quest, but you want to just select them to follow you—you can't. You have to either accept or deny the quest first, which is annoying.

I’m actually finding melee combat to be more of a nuisance than fun, it’s not all that easy to hit the enemy as everything is so imprecise and the hitboxes are weird, and it’s really easy to die. That’s part of the difficulty they are going for though, as you can do different workouts to increase speed and strength, but I’m just finding the combat annoying at the moment. The only way I’ve found to succeed even remotely at melee combat is to have one of my group fight a walker for me, then i stand there mashing the right mouse button hoping I’m actually hitting their now covered up health bar.

Honestly, I would go so far as to say that the combat in the game is pretty crap, and that’s a real shame.

The inventory system is very simple too, you don’t have a backpack (at the point in the game where I am) and only a few slots in your inventory bar which quickly fill up with junk you need to keep storing for when you actually find something useful. If I was able to drag and drop items, instead of having to click them and then guess where they would end up I would be happier. It didn't tell me that I could right click a weapon in the character screen to see its statistics, and for some reason such a simple thing took me ages to figure out. It's a small annoyance, but if it had just told me "oh by the way, right click a weapon while in the character screen to display its stats" I would have been a lot happier. I would have liked to be able to see a weapons statistics without having to pick it up, and then go to the character screen. Being able to right click on a weapon I find anywhere, and seeing an info box would have been a much nicer way to do it.

It does however have really nice music, and it works fine with my multimonitor setup. Working properly with multiple monitors is something a lot of developers still trip up on, so it's pleasing to see it wasn't an issue here,

Final thoughts: It’s interesting, but honestly the execution isn’t as good as I would have hoped. It’s actually frustrating to play it, but through each play-through I am finding more little things to like about it.

You can find The Escapists: The Walking Dead on GOG, Steam and Humble Store. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.