I have been chomping at the bit to play the next episode of The Walking Dead. Episodes 1 and 2 were stellar and ended on the perfect cliffhanger. As soon as the release date was announced, I circled the day on my calendar and waited patiently for the download to complete. Sadly, after completing this episode, I found myself utterly disappointed.
The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series – A New Frontier, Episode 3 “Above the Law” has the longest title of any game on Xbox One. Too bad it is the shortest episode of any Telltale game coming in at only 1 hour and 20 minutes. I also died a few times and had to restart from a checkpoint. While I do not know the statistics of every Telltale episode, I remember most being around the 2 hour mark. Either way, this episode was noticeably short.
I am not opposed to short, concise episodes when they answer the burning questions of the previous episodes as well as tell a clear story contained within. I feel that Episode 3 does neither. Without spoiling Episode 2, the cliffhanger at the end is brushed off like it doesn’t even matter at the beginning of Episode 3.
Imagine a mother puts a brand new white carpet in the house. At the end of Episode 2, a child drops a glass of grape juice on the brand new carpet. Then the screen cuts to black. That is how Episode 2 ends. But, when Episode 3 picks up, the mom says, “Oh, that’s no big deal, I will just get a new one because we are super rich.” That is how Episode 3 handles the resolution.
I felt burned by the beginning of the episode as it did not hit any of the marks that so obviously needed answering. Instead it tried to point me towards new issues that I didn’t care about. To use the analogy from before, it would be like your mom saying, “Oh, forget about the carpet, we got a new dog and it bites, look out!” Instead of answering the important question, I was given a different question and forced to believe it was important.
The entire story of Episode 3 falls flat. Usually, there is a trade-off between action and storytelling in Telltale games. This episode had a very small action sequence, almost no dialogue choices, and an underdeveloped story that switched between three different time periods. Overall, I would consider this episode the weakest of any in The Walking Dead series.
I also felt that the choices made during this episode were very mundane. In previous episodes, the developers give the player the choice to shoot their mother or shoot their wife. Either way the player has to give up something they love to progress the story. In this episode, the literal choice is to save a baby or do nothing. Who would choose to do nothing? How is that even a hard choice? I feel like the 15% of people that chose to do nothing were just trying to see what happens.
Those tough decisions are what make The Walking Dead great. Without them I am just being shown a simple story of survival, which I could get by watching the show. The reason I pay $5 an episode is to be involved in the decision making, and the lack of decisions really hurts this episode.
Returning for this episode are the incredibly long load times. I really hope these are put in check soon as they are the quickest way to pull me right out of the game. I am in this high pressure scenario with zombies attacking and people screaming, and then the game cuts to black for 15 seconds. That is enough to really drill in that this is only a game.
Also back are the stutters and frame drops that mostly went away with the last two episodes. As I said previously, I died a few times. Every time was because a button I pressed did not register due to the terrible frame rate. Twice, I completely missed a button prompt as the scene skipped ahead. Telltale said they were working on this issue specifically, but this was worse than any point in Episodes 1 and 2.
I won’t discuss the sound design or voice acting much more than to say they are stellar as always. The voice cast of this game is doing an incredible job and I really hope they get to shine in the upcoming episodes. Historically, Episode 4 is the worst of every series as it is the lead-in episode that sets up the big climax. I hope that isn’t true for this game, as any worse will actually make the episode bad instead of okay.
Summary
Even with all the problems of this episode, I think the series is excellent and has a chance to be on par with Season 1. I really hope the writers have a big payoff in the works, because a second drab episode in a row will sour this series beyond repair. I have full faith in Telltale to turn this story around, but we may have seen our first real misstep for the team at Telltale Games. Hopefully my next review will be a positive one.
Joshua was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 42 articles across game reviews, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative.