Waste of time and money
The lame-duck FPS mechanics are modestly spiced with resource management, which has you recruiting a handful of cookie-cutter survivors to scavenge for resources in the game's meager levels. Food, fuel, and ammunition can be found at pit stops between the game's main campaign maps, and you have the option of taking different routes in order to stock up. Taking the highway burns little of your precious gasoline, but is more likely to lead to your transportation breaking down. The back roads make you go through gas like water, but they offer more opportunities to scavenge for resources. You're pretty screwed either way, as trying to scavenge for these resources leads to the same conclusion: traipsing around even tinier maps than normal trying to find car parts or gas cans. It's a lose-lose situation.
Finally, there's the presentation of the game. First, the positive: stars Norman Reedus and Michael Rooker lends their vocal talents to Daryl and Merle Dixon, respectively, and they certainly class up the production quite a bit. There is a certain degree of "phoning in" present for each of them (at times Daryl's one-liners sound like he's as tired of the game as we are), but they certainly fare much better than the graphics. To put it bluntly, the game would have looked mediocre at the beginning of the console generation, so to see a game look this poorly in the twilight of the Xbox 360 (which I played it on) and the Playstation 3 is simply unacceptable. There are countless other games that use the Unreal Engine with phenomenal results, but Survival Instinct simply craps bland environments, ugly models, and muddy textures across the screen in a fashion that would be wince-inducing on a 15-dollar downloadable title, let alone a "bargain priced" 50-dollar retail release. The disappointment is amplified even further by the gross repetition of zombie models in the game, with the variety of walkers being so meager that you are literally dispatching the exact same zombie multiple times in the same level.
Ironically, given Telltale's episodic, seat-of-their-pants releasing of The Walking Dead: The Video Game, it's Survival Instinct that feels rushed and incomplete. Without compelling gameplay or, worst of all, characters you actually care about, the game feels like a pointless cash-grab. If you want a solid Walking Dead game just replay Telltale's effort and avoid Survival Instinct like the plague that it is: another disappointing license-waster.