The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners - Ch 2: Retribution (2023)

This glorified DLC adds just barely enough new areas and mechanics to justify its existence but both the good and the bad from the first game are increased by the repetition. Add to it more technical issues and some truly awful level design decisions and it's not a good overall experience.

The moment I knew I was going to quit was when the game threw me at an area with endlessly respawning enemies with terrible AI. The arena design is one of the laziest designs you can think of and it's just anathema to what this game is about. You can't have infinite enemies and (very) finite weapons and ammo. It also doesn't make sense in-world; even less so in the post-apocalypse. And not clearly indicating that enemies are endless so the player only starts to suspect it when they start to run out of ammo is a total dick move.

The story is also even less compelling. The player is thrown into a plot, media res, immerse in a network of people they never met but the character knows intimately. Then they add this Jason-style antagonist which makes it all less believable and relatable.

I almost ragequit the game after it made me (slowly) walk through a zombie-infested school to an NPC that told me to go save another NPC from another part of the zombie-infested school. All at night. After I found them tied to a bomb, the game instructed me to "find a way to save" them but there was no evident way and I exploded before I could make much progress. Since the game only saves at the start of each level, I had to do all the walking all over again.

Luckily I googled the level and confirmed that there was no way to save the NPC and I actually needed to just walk away from the blast. That saved me a lot of time of repeating the same level over and over again, but it was such bad level design that I wanted to quit, copy the game files to an USB stick and throw it through the window.

More of the same, with some tweaks. There are a couple of new areas and some of the old areas have some cosmetic changes. Two new crafting stations; one with more unnecessary weapons and another with some useful health and stamina upgrades that I maxed out after day 5 (I imported a save from the previous game so I carried over all my materials).

At least there's more story and characters and now you can scavenge at night, which is another mechanic to reuse the same areas.