This past Sunday, the sixth season of AMC’s The Walking Dead debuted. And while we all wait to figure out what the deal with that horn was, we can enjoy a nice little distraction in the form of The Walking …
This past Sunday, the sixth season of AMC’s The Walking Dead debuted. And while we all wait to figure out what the deal with that horn was, we can enjoy a nice little distraction in the form of The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land, a new strategy game from Next Games.
You might remember August’s Walking Dead: Road to Survival, and while some of you may still be playing it (it was quite good), many of you are probably more interested in a game based in the AMC show’s universe. In Walking Dead: No Man’s Land, players get just that, an adventure set parallel to the events seen in the television series.
Yes, that’s right, that means Daryl is in it.
He’s actually the little tutorial guy who explains the basics of the game to you, and then he rides away on his cool-guy motorcycle because he’s just too cool to hangout with us.
Though, anyone who has played a mobile strategy game in the past few years doesn’t need Daryl there to begin with. The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land is pretty standard as far as mobile strategy games go: build up a base, collect resources generated over set amounts of time, use those resources to build up your base and your team of survivors, and then send your survivors out on missions to progress through the story. There are some multiplayer elements in the form of guilds, but the single-player campaign seems to be the main focus of No Man’s Land.
When you’re not managing your base, you’ll be out on missions with your survivors. No Man’s Land is turn-based, so you can scoot your players around the board either taking out walkers, running from walkers, or looting for supplies. Each survivor belongs to a different class and each class has their own unique ability; some survivors can stun walkers in place, while others can shoot through multiple walkers at once. Learning how to take advantage of each survivor’s special abilities and play those abilities off of the other survivors is the real challenge in the game, and it’s quite a fun one at that. In a lot of ways, the experience could best be described as “XCOM Lite.”
The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land wouldn’t be a proper Walking Dead game if it didn’t include randomly shifting the odds against the survivors though. And boy does it.
Periodically throughout the levels, hordes of walkers will crawl out into the level and attempt to impede your progress. While not impossible to deal with, the infusion of a handful of additional walkers certainly kicks the difficulty up a notch, and can easily foil player’s plans. It’s a nice twist to an otherwise familiar strategy experience.
Imagine your favorite mobile base-building strategy game, mix in a dash of XCOM, and then paint on a fresh coat of AMC’s The Walking Dead. That’s No Man’s Land in a nutshell: it’s nothing new to play, but the game features tried-and-true mechanics and comes with a heaping amount of appeal for fans of the television series to digest.
