Game Reviews

Fear the Walking Dead: Dead Run - How many times can you say dead before it loses all meaning?

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Fear the Walking Dead: Dead Run - How many times can you say dead before it loses all meaning?

Fear The Walking Dead: Dead Run is a tie-in to the spin-off TV show. And it's full of zombies and IAPs and the sort of gritty grittiness that gets in between your teeth.

And it's fine. There's nothing broken about it really, although it did have a tendency to judder every now and then on my iPhone 6 Plus.

If you like zombies and shooting zombies and running away from zombies and hitting zombies with a tyre iron then you'll probably enjoy this. Albeit briefly.

It's an autorunner, right?

It is indeed. You're pelting through silhouetted streets that are filled with the walking dead. Some of them are far away, some of them are close, and all of them want to bite into your deliciously chewy flesh.

You've got a couple of guns, a limited amount of ammo, and a melee weapon to stave them off with. You can tap on any of the undead to pop off a shot in their direction, and when one gets too close you get to mush a button that pops up.

A lot of the scenery is destructible too, and you get extra points for causing chaos. Whether or not that's a good idea when you've got a handful of bullets and there are a bunch of zombies chasing you remains to be seen.

There are two different modes, but ostensibly they task you with doing the same thing. One is a standard running mode, the other follows episodes of the TV series so you can keep up with the story.

Although I'll be honest, I haven't seen the TV show, and even after completing the first episode I still have no idea what's going on. Well, other than that zombies are bad.

There are some neat ideas here though. Sometimes the perspective shifts and rather than running from left to right you're running towards or away from the camera, and the violence keeps what would otherwise be a pretty standard experience exciting.

One for the fans of the show though?

I'd say so. I mean, other than the branding you'd be hard pressed to tell that this was a tie-in game. And I mean that in a good way and a bad way.

Sure it's generic, and sure it's not the most captivating idea, but it's all reasonably solid, and you won't mind the time you spend darting through its gloom.

But at the same time, you're not going to want to bump any other games from your homescreen to make space for this one.

Fear the Walking Dead: Dead Run - How many times can you say dead before it loses all meaning?

A solid autorunner, but one that doesn't really have any flare or swagger to it
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.