Zombies can be fun to mow down, but they also run the risk of being one of the least interesting types of enemy monsters: slow, bulky, rotting husks that are better buried than occupying our attention. If nothing else, The Walking Dead: Fates, based on the fantastic early seasons of the TV show, managed to embody all of their worst qualities. In its ugly attempts to shuffle its feet, even looking like a rotten husk of a game from the Xbox 360 era, Destinies deserves neither your attention nor access to your wallet – and we’d be better off if this boring mess remained buried in the past, from which it seems , dug out her broken mechanics. While it earns a small amount of credit for at least trying to play with storylines that differ from the TV show, there’s little that’s done to lift it above the muck of bland design, terrible character models, and a laughable feeling that it’s barely game draft.
Long-time fans of the TV show are obviously the target audience, as the characters do a poor job of imitating the visual likeness of their real-life performers. But aside from trying to strike a chord through recognizability, Destinies assumes you know the whole tune as you’re unceremoniously thrown into the shoes of Rick Grimes after he wakes up alone in the hospital.
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This is where – right at the start of what has become eight or nine excruciating hours – everything falls apart.
The hospital is naturally filled with zombies, and Rick has to find his way out using some basic mechanics like push, steal and heal that we’ve seen in pretty much every post-apocalyptic third-person horror game ever, but worse. Zombies are mindless by design, sure, but they’re some of the most incompetent enemies you’ll encounter in any video game. As well as only having about three zombie models, they also get stuck in walls, break through ceilings, run into each other and are as dangerous as a wet sock on the carpet: annoying and unattractive, but otherwise forgettable .
Fates is ugly as sin, with terrible character models, horrible lighting, and home environments that are themselves used repeatedly. I’ve been playing a lot of post-Xbox 360 games on my Series X lately, and I can tell you that this current-gen game looks worse than the nearly 20-year-old GTA IV.
The texture resolution reminds me of the bad webcams we all encountered during the early COVID-19 Zoom calls. At least the PS5’s 60fps frame rate seemed consistent when it wasn’t crashing and displaying so-called cutscenes. I also encountered several game-breaking bugs, one of which required a complete restart. Also, during the boss fight, my character refused to interact with the enemy to start the cutscene. Not to mention the sound and music kept disappearing for no reason until I restarted.
Speaking of which, the cutscenes themselves are in line with the cheap-looking type of placeholders we’ve seen in games like Redfall and Rise of Kong (which were also behind Destinies publisher GameMill). The characters are shown in static poses while their actors voice their lines, giving you a chance to see their creepy designs in all their glory. They’re obviously supposed to vaguely resemble their TV counterparts, but they look like what you’d get if you asked me to draw them from memory.
Surprisingly, the voice acting isn’t really terrible, but the actors didn’t have to work very hard. For example, they all have one-liners when they destroy enemies or fight them off: “My blood boils!” “Get off me!” and so on – everything repeats itself endlessly. In the context of a dangerous world of constant terror, hearing amazing action figures in the same line from both an ex-cop and a 70-year-old farmer was mind-blowing.
The Fates don’t even tell the story of the series well. For example, early on when Rick’s son Carl is shot, it’s never explained who shot him, and no one seems to know or care. In general. In fact, Otis, the show’s culprit, doesn’t even appear in Destinies. Instead, the survivors simply grab the boy and flee to the Greene Farm story arc, which sadly slowed down the pace of the series.
The only thing Destinies has is the ability to play with the titular dynamic: the destinies of its characters. There are many instances where you have to make a binary decision that will result in death or leaving a survivor. If you know the show, it’s certainly nice to make a decision that goes against the established plot. Most notably, you can basically remake the main character by choosing who wins a fight between Rick and Shane after they spend some time on the farm, allowing Shane to become a husband and father to Rick’s family. That’s a pretty dramatic, fundamental change!
It’s clear that the developers loved the show, given the work they put into portraying Shane in a way we’ve never seen him before. He grows hair and a beard, develops relationships with characters he’s never met, and so on. Another good example of an impactful decision is changing who becomes the final boss’s right-hand man based on a decision you make in the first few hours. But unfortunately, it’s only interesting from a conceptual point of view, as it still fails miserably in execution, and naturally, most of the decisions have little to no effect on the actual plot.
The survivors move through different areas of the camp in their epic journey, such as the previously mentioned farm and later the prison. They become hubs where you do three things: start the next main and side missions, resolve a pointless conflict between two characters, and “talk” to other survivors. And by conversation, I mean that each person will say one random generic phrase every time you return to the center, offering no reflection on the events going on around them. For example, Rick’s wife Lori will tell the man who blew her husband’s brains out about how she likes to make pancakes for the family on Sundays.
In each main mission, you usually play as another survivor. It often doesn’t make much sense, as you’re usually on your own or playing as the worst person at the task at hand. For example, a few hours into Destinies, Laurie gives birth in a prison, but minutes later you play as her to retrieve items from a nearby department store. They were there many other survivors who didn’t just survive birth in a zombie apocalypse who could leave, but of course let’s send a new mother. No explanation is given. Another time, a 70-year-old farmer is sent – alone – to return a machine gun and ammunition to a prison basement. You will never be told why someone who actually has a gun – such as a younger, more nimble police officer – could not have gone in place of, or at least accompanied, the old farmer.
Destinies tries to change the scenarios in its main quests, but they all boil down to getting to a certain part of the map or collecting items. It’s very rare that two characters will be together, helping each other out – which has been a central focus of the entire show and its spin-offs. It was possible to force one character to make decisions that the other character had to suffer the consequences of, but Destinies doesn’t do anything about it.
In fact, it’s just not very good with consequences in general. The main and titular dynamic of Destinies is watching your choices shape the lives of the survivors, but it doesn’t work well enough to sustain the illusion. More than once, I’ve seen characters I’ve killed – intentionally or unintentionally – appear during cutscenes. Rick’s son, who was shot dead in my playthrough, was running away from the farm in a static cutscene; Rick himself, who I ordered Shane to kill, appeared for a few seconds, fighting the horde in the final battle. It could be a universe where the dead come back from the grave, but I don’t think Destinies does it right.
Each survivor has a variety of unique skills that can be upgraded by gaining skill points, completing quests, or… finding radios, for some reason? For example, a pizza delivery boy can stealthily increase his speed to avoid conflict with zombies, or Rick’s revolver can deal more damage. The skill tree is a huge eyesore and ultimately pointless – within the first two hours I had already maxed everyone.
Even fully modernized, the combat in Destinies is some of the worst you’ll ever experience, and it feels like it was lifted from a shovel from previous console generations. There is no recoil or feel from weapons or melee weapons. Shooting is floaty and unresponsive, with a terrible auto-lock that forces you to target nearby enemies. Every character has the same set of moves, whether they’re a hunter in uniform or a new mom. Characters can use some sort of super move if they’ve built up enough “adrenaline” that restores health and kills enemies instantly, but it also seems pointless when you’re fighting zombies, who are very slow and die in two hits.
Eventually you start facing tougher human enemies, but their armor and agility just means they’re more annoying and take longer to kill. Strangely enough, they also appear out of nowhere and are not talked about at all. They first appear during Shane’s only flashback sequence as he tries to rescue Rick from the hospital – who are they? What do they want? Why are they attacking Shane? Unfortunately, you’d never know unless you watched the series. Shane himself never reacts to it.
