The Walking Dead: The Game -- Episode 2: Starved for Help Review

Toss the idea of slaying zombies out of your head; The Walking Dead: The Game -- Episode 2: Starved for Help is a suspense thriller. Yes, the undead lumber around, but developer Telltale Games throws us a curveball here and focuses our concern on man's inhumanity to man. That's pretty awesome.

The second of five downloadable episodes, Starved for Help picks up three months after the zombie apocalypse broke out in the original episode of The Walking Dead: The Game. We're still playing as Lee Everett, protecting Clementine, and dealing with a motley group of survivors assembled at a makeshift fortress that used to be a motel.

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It's a dilemma that had me debating whose side I was on and turning my back on established relationships, and that's pretty frickin' impressive.

This time, we get to see the fruits of our labor in the first game. See, The Walking Dead: The Game is all about choice and consequence. Rather than focus on action, the majority of the game is building relationships by talking to people. You don't get a second chance to say something in this adventure game; dialogue pops up, and you have a limited amount of time to make a choice that will influence your friends and make new enemies. (For nuts and bolts of how the game controls, please check out the review of Episode 1.)

Every one of those decisions is then carried on into future episodes, so Episode 2 is the first time to see what that exactly means, and what it means is a whole lot of reasons to replay the episode. What Lilly thinks of you, how much Clementine trusts you, which lies do you have to remember -- all of the decisions you made before set the stage for Lee’s continuing story. Based on which survivor you saved in Episode 1, you have different defenses and plenty of new information in Episode 2.

And then things go to a dark place. A really dark place.

Playing on an iPhone or iPad? 

The Walking Dead: The Game -- Episode 2: Starved for Help is out now for iOS and we've put it through its paces. The port is generally top-notch. Players will make all the same gruesome choices, experience the same dialogue and see the same visuals as the console & PC release. There are some frame rate drops and general hitching for the first few seconds of every new scene, but it quickly resolves itself. This issue is slightly more prevalent here than on consoles, but it is not serious enough to be more than a minor annoyance. 

The Walking Dead's more action-oriented gameplay works great with revised touch-screen controls. Rather than move an on-screen reticle with a joystick, players simply tap the screen when they need to stomp a zombie or perform another action. Other moments, like smashing a walker's head into the side of a pick-up, are done with a simple swipe left or right. Moving Lee is slightly more awkward - players slide their finger in the direction they want to walk. But it still works. 

The Walking Dead: The Game only supports iPhone 4 / iPad 2 and newer devices. The more modern your device, the less stuttering you're likely to experience. Episode 2 can be purchased from within the The Walking Dead: The Game for $4.99, or $14.99 for a season pass.

Anyone concerned with the quality of Telltale's iOS port can put their concerns to rest. The experience might be a hair inferior to playing on a console or PC, but playing on your mobile device is still a great way to see this intimate and intense story unfold.

-Justin Davis, IGN Wireless Editor

Starved for Help opens with the series' most grotesque moment so far (if you choose to play it that way, of course), but beyond that, it starts stretching your moral muscles. The group's nearly out of food, and when it's up to you to choose which few survivors get rations for the day, you have to figure out if you're playing favorites or focusing on the greater good.

It's all about the tough choices.

The greater good: that's key to the episode. While Episode 1 was a whirlwind of chaos, life's moving at a steady pace here, and it's time to decide if Lee's going to be an upstanding person or a cold-hearted survivor. It's a dilemma that had me debating whose side I was on and turning my back on established relationships, and that's pretty frickin' impressive.

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For that moment, I really was Lee, and he wasn't the man I thought he was.

Choice in games is mostly black and white, but suddenly I was thinking "Why do I care what Clementine thinks of me? We need to think about surviving," when all I wanted to do was keep her happy last episode. I can't think of another game that had me establish a character I thought I knew and then be debating big decisions a few scenes later. I began wrestling with whether a Mass Effect-style Paragon or Renegade playthrough made sense here -- could I mix and match?

That tug of war over feelings comes into full view when a new group of survivors from the St. John's Dairy Farm show up and invite your group to come over and trade gas for food. The family asks Lee all sorts of probing questions about the group, but are they being creepy or protective? Do you turn your back on the strangers or hope the relationship brings salvation?

Have questions? Check out Telltale and IGN's Official The Walking Dead: The Game Wiki.

I'm not going to spoil the lynchpin moments that come later, but know that Telltale spends a lot of time setting the stage. The suspense builds like a slowly filling water balloon as you have conversations accented with just enough weirdness to unsettle you and then other characters. Then, there's the reveal, and the water balloon pops.

As the final events of Episode 2 rushed at me, there was no time for weighing decisions and pondering if I was trying to impress Clementine. I saw the response I'd personally give and picked it. For that moment, I really was Lee, and he wasn't the man I thought he was.

It's heavy stuff, but The Walking Dead is still just a game -- something some technical hiccups remind you of over and over again. Lip syncing seems to be a bit more lax this time around, music will drop out mid track, and animations (which were already a bit herky jerky) will freeze as scenes change. None of these are issues that should make you skip this title, but they pull you out of an otherwise engrossing experience. The same thing can be said for characters’ weird side comments that Lee doesn't investigate and Lee's observations that I doubt any of us would make -- just little gripes that remind you this is a game.

Source : ign[dot]com