Overkill's The Walking Dead

Overkill's The Walking Dead departed from the narrative style of Telltale's games and offered a cooperative survival shooter for four players, in which the main enemy is a lack of ammunition and the noise that attracts hordes of the infected. The Swedish studio Overkill Software, known for the Payday series, tried to carry a similar system of team roles, heist planning and gradual character upgrades over into the post-apocalyptic setting of Robert Kirkman's comic book source.

Each of the four playable characters has their own special abilities and weapons suited to a different play style, from silent close-range takedowns to long-range team support, and the game emphasizes teamwork in clearing locations and completing missions in a more open post-apocalyptic setting. Technically, unfortunately, the game suffered at release from a number of bugs, long loading times and unbalanced difficulty, which together with the repetitive mission structure significantly damaged both the first impression and long-term playability.

Critics and the player community received the game coldly, which led to a quick end of support and essentially a premature end of the project only a few months after release. Overkill's The Walking Dead thus became a cautionary example of how a strong license and an interesting concept cannot save a game suffering from an unfinished technical state, and for many players it remains more of a curiosity than a recommended experience from the world of the zombie apocalypse.