The last episode of the final season of The Walking Dead Final Season is finally here! Are you ready? Then learn if the final story arc is worth your time and money in our Telltale’s The Walking Dead: The Final Season review!
EdEN reviewed the previous episodes Done Running Review, Suffer the Children Review and Broken Toys Review, and since the last episode has finally released, we’re reviewing the full season for those of you who want to “binge-play” the full season in one go!
The Walking Dead: The Final Season had a very weird development cycle. Right as the third episode was in development, on September 2018, Telltale Games announced that the studio was closing, leaving episodes 3 and 4 in hiatus, until Skybound Games took over the development in November 2018 and confirmed that TWD: The Final Season would be completed.
I’ve personally played nearly every episodic release from Telltale Games since the launch of Back To The Future, and The Walking Dead had always been my personal favorite series, with The Walking Dead: Michonne being a highlight in the series that deserves to be mentioned. In the main The Walking Dead series with Lee/Clementine series, I’ve always been amazed by how Clementine’s growth both as a character and physically has changed how players have to approach each season. In this fourth and final season, Clementine is to AJ what Lee was to her in season one, so this is a really interesting way to end the series. Clementine turned into a real bad-ass over the many seasons, and she has become one of the best female leads in video games.
The Walking Dead: The Final Season begins by retelling the main events of the previous seasons. If you already played them, then your choices will be imported from your save. If not, or if your save was not uploaded to the Telltale Games cloud, you can once again make your main choices or even select new choices altogether and build a brand new backstory leading up to the events of the final season.
As the first episode begins, we can see how the relationship between Clementine and AJ has changed, as they’re both now older as a few years have passed since the last time we saw them. As expected of The Walking Dead series, it starts with a bang, so be ready to witness epic action-packed sequences throughout the whole season! Speaking of which, I noticed that in each of the four episodes, there was one action sequence that was strangely way harder than the regular ones throughout the episodes. You’ll know what I mean once you reach one!
You can skip the next section if you want to have an absolutely spoiler-free experience, but even if you continue reading, I’m not going to go too in-depth on the game’s plot.
Still here? Essentially, Clementine and AJ are looking for a place to live and finally settle down instead of having to hide in different places, always going farther and farther from finding a home. This is when they end up in a school that is home to a group of kids who used to go to that school before the zombie apocalypse. They will make friends and, of course, it won’t be as easy as it could have been before the outbreak. Will they be able to stop running and finally settle down? You will only learn about it if you play the game!
As you can imagine, as you progress, more of the choices you made in the previous seasons will come to haunt you, and more than once you’ll feel like this wasn’t what you wished for. I wondered more than once what would have happened if I’d acted differently for a specific event in season 1, or another one in season 3. This is the first Telltale Game release in a while that doesn’t allow you to go back to a previous chapter, so be sure to have more than one backup save if you want to experience the series as a whole without restarting an episode from the beginning.
Something that is different for this season is that we’re getting four episodes instead of five. Worry not because each of the four episodes will be a bit longer than what we usually got from each individual episode in previous seasons, so you are getting more than enough content with your season purchase. The game looks great on PS4 and features a new revised art style as well as a behind the shoulder camera for exploration sections which makes the whole experience feel fresh. I did notice some rather lengthy loading times while playing this season on my standard PlayStation 4, which sometimes broke the story’s pacing. As for Trophy Hunters, please take note: for this season, trophies aren’t awarded just by progressing through the game, as was the case for previous seasons in the series, since you’ll need to find some collectibles in each episode, as well as complete some miscellaneous objectives.
Final Thoughts
I loved (binge) playing The Walking Dead: The Final Season for this review, and I’m actually sad about how this is the last Telltale Game release we’ll ever get to play. Being the last season of The Walking Dead, I expected the story would go out with a bang, but after playing all episodes, I felt that it was missing something. Mind you, there are some great moments, and seeing how Clementine had grown as a character is certainly worth the price of admission. The last episode, in particular, was one of the most stressful Telltale episodes I sat through, but at the same time, it was one of the most exciting episodes I’ve ever played!
It’s been a long run, and I want to thank Telltale Games for releasing so many high-quality story-based games over the years, as well as thank Skybound Games for taking over the development of this series to give fans one last go at the franchise.
Price: $19.99
PSN Game Size: 10GB
Disclaimer
This The Walking Dead: The Final Season review is based on a PlayStation 4 copy provided by Skybound Games.
