Overkill’s The Walking Dead (2018) 🧟‍♂️🎮

The Walking Dead game that didn’t even survive three months


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Lets start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

🎬 Trailers

The trailers promised us a gritty, co-op survival game with the weight of The Walking Dead name behind it. Instead, we got a clunky mess that disappeared faster than you could reload a jammed gun.


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📖 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

Set in Washington D.C., players take on the roles of four survivors caught between scavenging for supplies, defending their camp, and dealing with both the undead and hostile human factions. Sounds decent on paper, right? Too bad the execution was so bland that you’ll forget every character and villain five minutes after meeting them.


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🎭 Character Rundown

Aidan, Maya, Grant, and Heather – the four playable survivors. All had different backstories teased in flashy trailers… yet in the game, they’re flat archetypes with zero real development.

The Family (villains) – a generic band of thugs with all the menace of wet cardboard. Their leader, Anderson, is as forgettable as the “Press F to Pay Respects” meme.


No attachment, no stakes, no reason to care.


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⏱️ Pacing / Episode Flow

Instead of flowing like a tense survival campaign, the game felt like recycled missions stitched together:

Fetch quest.

Defend base.

Rinse and repeat.
All while praying the game didn’t bug out and soft-lock your progress.



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✅ Pros

Atmosphere. The dark, decayed look of Washington D.C. sometimes hit the right notes, especially when walking through ruined apartments or abandoned streets.

Co-op potential. On rare occasions when the game wasn’t broken, working with friends could be fun in a Left 4 Dead–lite kind of way.


That’s… it.


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❌ Cons

Oh boy, buckle up.

Glitches galore.

Enemies spawning inside walls.

Weapons clipping through environments.

Zombies moonwalking across the map.

Quest markers failing to trigger, forcing full mission restarts.

AI allies standing frozen while you’re ripped apart.


Outdated animations. Swinging a melee weapon looked like PS2 leftovers. Gun recoil felt floaty, zombie death animations repeated on loop until you questioned reality.

Unbalanced gameplay.

Ammo scarcity that felt punishing instead of challenging.

Loud enemies spawning even when you were sneaking perfectly.

Difficulty spikes where you’d get swarmed unfairly.


Lackluster story.

Bland protagonists you’ll forget instantly.

Villains who feel like dollar-store raiders, offering no menace or intrigue.

No emotional hook compared to Telltale’s Walking Dead.


Technical catastrophe.

Frame rate drops even on powerful PCs.

Server issues at launch that made co-op a nightmare.

Patches that barely fixed anything before the game was yanked.


Non-existent shelf life.
Released November 2018. Removed from Steam by February 2019. You literally can’t play it anymore unless you kept an old install.



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💭 Final Thoughts

Overkill’s The Walking Dead could’ve been a decent co-op survival horror. Instead, it became one of gaming’s most infamous flops — remembered less for what it was, and more for how quickly it vanished. Between the glitches, outdated animations, boring story, and uninspired villains, it deserved its quick death.


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⭐ Rating

2/10. A shambling corpse of a game, and not in the fun zombie way.


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⚠️ Spoiler Warning

Past this point are story/mission specifics.


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🩸 Spoilers

The story tries to pit your survivors against “The Family,” a human enemy faction straight out of Generic Villains R Us. Their leader, Anderson, spends most of the campaign yelling into radios and sending waves of faceless goons at you.

The problem? None of it matters. The characters never evolve, their arcs never land, and the villains never feel like a real threat. Even the “big moments” — raids, rescues, base defenses — collapse under the weight of bugs and repetition.

The game ends without payoff, leaving you with the sense that you just wasted your time on a glorified early-access title.