The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival is out now
The retro arcade brawler is out now on PC and consoles, with Rick, Daryl and Michonne playable and Negan waiting to be unlocked.
The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival is out now. It is a side-scrolling arcade brawler that turns AMC's walker apocalypse into a 12-level punch-up, and it arrived on 18 September on PC and consoles at €19,99 on Steam, where it is a Windows release.
What you actually get
Rick Grimes, Daryl Dixon and Michonne are the three starting fighters, each taken through 12 levels of walkers and Saviors, and Negan is in there as an unlockable character swinging Lucille. It is built by Odaclick Game Studio and published by Trailmark Games, and it sits inside the licensed The Walking Dead world rather than continuing any of the Telltale storylines.
The pitch is deliberately old-fashioned
Short levels, crowd-clearing combat and a small cast of characters people already have opinions about: this is a genre that has never needed much more than that. It is also a modest ask at under £20 rather than full price, and a public demo ran on Steam through Next Fest, so nobody has to guess what they are buying. Trailmark's own launch announcement puts the release on Steam and consoles on the same day, without breaking out platform-specific pricing.
Our opinion
Licensed brawlers live or die on whether the licence is doing any work beyond the box art. This one finds the useful part of The Walking Dead: a cast with established loyalties, and a setting where hitting a thing with a baseball bat is not merely permitted but thematically correct. The restraint is the selling point. It is not pretending to be a premium narrative game, it showed its hand in a public demo weeks ago, and it charges accordingly. The open question is the console side of the release, which shipped on day one with far less noise than the Steam version and will decide whether this becomes a licence Trailmark returns to or a single outing.