Telltale’s The Walking Dead is based on Robert Kirkman's award-winning zombie apocalypse comic series (which also has a TV show). Developer Telltale Games specialise in episodic adventure games.
Due to the emphasis on story, those looking for a challenging game should avoid it because they won't find it here. You need to view the software as an interactive story rather than a game to fully enjoy it. A New Frontier is Season 3 of the Clementine story.
You can either choose a Season 2 save file to import, or answer questions to set what happened in the past. This changes what happens in some of Clementine’s flashback sequences.
Clementine is now a teenager with more attitude. She has raised baby AJ so has some parenting skills, and is very protective and is cautious of who she trusts.
Clementine isn’t the main character although she is a fairly prominent character. Instead, you play as Javi who is surviving with his brother’s kids; Gabe and Marianna, and his brother’s wife Kate. You are introduced to the family with a flashback that seems to be set before the outbreak. Javi rushes back to their family home to be there for his dying father but gets there too late. His brother David is a belligerent character and gives Javi a lot of abuse. Their Dad reanimates as a zombie and Javi staves his Dad’s head in with no reaction from the family. It’s a bit strange if you’d never encountered a zombie before.
I don’t normally like discussing the story in these games since that is a clear spoiler. I’ll try and keep it vague as I can, but I think in this installment, there’s some parts that I really didn’t like, and obviously it seems to get off to a bad start.
I’ve read negative player reviews for the first 2 Seasons where they say characters did dumb actions and didn’t act in a rational way, but I disagreed - those games were really well written. This game has many jarring events that I was shaking my head at.
In the present day, the family is scavenging for fuel for their van, but they accidentally take it from a group that is later revealed to be the New Frontier which initiates a conflict. Soon, there is a gun fight that starts when Marianna is hit, then Kate runs into the line of fire and gets hit, so then Gabe also runs into the line of fire. After you begin to escape, Clementine decides she is going to take them on single-handedly. A nearby town takes you in, but you bring the New Frontier to overrun the town. Even though the leader has lost everything, the leader and his close friends are rather friendly towards you. Soon there is another conflict where he loses more because of your actions, but he quickly moves on even if you admit what happened. Towards the end of the game, someone brings this moment up again, and he completely flips out at you and says he never wants to see you again, but soon u-turns and acts as if you are best friends. Additionally, despite the New Frontier being the biggest threat to Javi, he walks right up to their camp begging them for help.
Aside from these moments, the story and character development is similar to the previous seasons. So often you end up feeling sympathetic to people you initially perceived to be bad. People are doing what they can to survive and have to make hard choices.
There’s quite a few choices in the game but it's mainly “you're damned if you do, damned if you don't”. The choices are often just an illusion of choice. If the choices did make an impact on the game, the entire story would be different which isn't really feasible for developers to achieve. However, after doing a bit of research, I was surprised that Conrad can die in episode 2, or survive until the end. At the end of the game you are given a summary of how your decisions affect people’s perception of you. Maybe there are more differences in the story than I thought, but I would probably have to replay the game to see just how much this changes.
There’s usually a couple of flashbacks in each episode, one with Javi and one with Clementine. I felt some of these would have been better placed a bit earlier in the story. When you did have choices in the flashbacks, I felt my choices were influenced by how I know the characters in the present timeline.
Along the course of the game, there are places where you must find an item or learn something about your surroundings in order for the game to progress. The camera is still slightly too zoomed in, the walking feels slow and clunky, and some of the areas feel pointless as all you do is go to the few interactive objects to progress. There’s not many of these sections, but I felt it would be better if they were more frequent and more elaborate.
The game looks like it is using the updated engine from the spinoff Michonne game. So it features better graphics, better lighting, and new UI.
You can control Javi using the WASD keys, and mouse click to make your selection. I’d imagine it would be also compatible with a controller, using the control stick to move and face buttons for interaction.
The conversations usually have limited time to respond, which partially helps the conversation to have a more realistic flow, but also forces you to make a quick decision under pressure. Saying nothing at all can also be an option. This time, I felt the dialogue prompts didn’t quite match what the character said. Some of them had the complete opposite tone to how I felt they played out which is absolutely infuriating when you are trying to roleplay as a character. There were even a few key decisions which I’d misinterpreted.
Quick-time action sequences are used to deal with zombie attacks which can be quite violent. Here you will hammer the Q key, and sometimes press E to finalise the action. If you die, you are brought back to the last check-point which is saved at regular, logical intervals. It’s quite hard to die because the timing window seems very generous, and it seemed to ignore me when I pressed the wrong key.
Another reason why the game doesn’t seem as interesting is that the entire season is mainly set in one town. Only in the first couple of episodes do you see a few different locales.
In Season Two, part of the story was about a group run by an oppressive leader. This season is partly treading the same ground, but a slightly different take on it. It’s a larger group that has expanded to a city, run by a few government leaders with strict rules.
The game is split over 5 episodes and it lasts about 7 hours which is a bit short; a couple of hours shorter than the previous season.
The first two Seasons are highly recommended, and I think it is fine to leave the story at that point because it concludes the story of the original survivors. Obviously Clementine is still going but it reached a satisfying conclusion.
I had mixed feelings about this game. There were moments where it felt as good as the previous seasons, but then it had moments that seemed quite jarring. I’d probably only recommend it if the next season is satisfying and ties in well with this one.