The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series (2019)

Seriously? Right from the start, a character who’s kind-hearted but a complete idiot? How many times can someone trip over themselves or drop things before it gets unbearable? And then all the people he meets—emotionally unstable, egocentric, convinced they're the smartest beings alive. It's no wonder I find humans exhausting. Sometimes it feels like people are driven by nothing but delusion and self-importance. If this is truly representative of humanity—even partially—then it’s hard not to feel a deep sense of despair. If I were an alien arriving on Earth, I might genuinely question whether the species is worth saving.

What was really poorly thought out and programmed is the fact that they’re supposedly starving for weeks, yet both Kenny`s wife and Lenny are still noticeably overweight. That’s just odd.

And then you can't even skip the nonsense — not even scenes you've already seen or after you've died. How badly designed is that? Unskippable cutscenes, forced "Previously on..." segments, and even the damn credits. It's just ridiculous.

The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series is an absolute steal if you, like me, pick it up in a sale. It's a defining series for Telltale and it's one of the things that I point to for any non-gamer that showcases the power of the medium. Unfortunately its just the same old games running in the Telltale Tool engine with a launcher, there doesn't appear to be any time spent in polishing the games, there's a new visual filter to make the early games look more like the latter however I would highly recommend turning it off as it's too aggressive and scrubs decent texture work and detail out of the environments.

The games don't suffer from the same stutters as it did on original hardware but they're just as buggy as they ever were - I'd argue the Xbox version, at least, is possibly worse off as this new Definitive Version has a new bug which causes my game to crash back to the dashboard nearly every time I completed an episode; the achievement would pop and game would crash so I rarely ever got to see the screen that shows you your choices vs other players.

The Good

• Some of the best storytelling in a game.
• Insane value for money if on a sale
• Excellent voice acting
• Characters you will love to hate
• You are dead inside if by the end of the series you aren't ready to cap anyone that dares threaten Clem.

The Bad

• You won't notice on one play through but if it's super apparent a second time through how much you are on pre-determined rails. It's fun to make decisions but the term "illusion of choice" could be Telltale's slogan. Don't rejoice if you save a character as Telltale very likely opt to kill them down the line anyway.
• Some decisions are case of dumb decision 1 and dumb decision 2. Being forced to do something dumb is not fun.
• New visual filter is pointless
• Crashes regularly
• Bugs
• More bugs

NB. Do not read the graphic novels that continue Clementine's story. They are shockingly bad. Let Clem rest. She has deserved it.