Reviews
[Review] ‘The Walking Dead: Onslaught’ Brings More Undead Slaughter to PSVR With Middling Results
The Walking Dead takes another trip to the world of virtual reality with Survios’ The Walking Dead: Onslaught. Will it be another worthy video game adaptation of the popular zombie epic?
After the well-received Saints and Sinners, this latest video game adaptation is based on the AMC TV show, and puts you in the grubby boots of its stars. Here you can wield Michonne’s katana, blast Walkers with Rick Grimes’ revolver, and ventilate undead heads with Daryl Dixon’s crossbow, but this isn’t just a shooting gallery, as Onslaught also focuses on another key aspect of the show, the growth of a community in the wake of the Saviours storyline.
The game is split into two distinct kinds of play as a result. You’ll go out on missions that benefit Alexandria where you fight off shambling undead whilst looking for supplies and the like. All the while, a horde is closing in, giving a sense of urgency to what is rather a rather basic rinse and repeat mission structure. There is a campaign that focuses on Daryl Dixon, which gives a narrative incentive to repeat these patterns. It’s a brief, but brand new, story set in the world of the AMC show that involves a botched supply run and an encounter with a stranger. It isn’t much more than the kind of filler you’d find in an episode of the show, but it’s nice to have a stronger narrative encouragement than ‘get these things, don’t get eaten’, even if that is a perfectly fine way to encourage you.
While the premise is simple, the execution of it is smartly done. After choosing your preferred VR control setup and running through the basics of movement and combat, you’re thrust into a small-scale example of how to use your newfound skills in a proper environment.
You use the Move wands as hands, and can use them to move forward by swinging your arms. Despite the fairly limiting nature of the wands in representing hand movement, Servios have done a decent job. In melee combat for instance, you can push a Walker away or grab it by the neck in the correct context, and use your other hand to drive a knife through the rotting ghoul’s skull. It’s a touch fiddly at first, but as you mesh together the different combat options and get a grip on movement, there’s a simple thrill from escaping gnashing jaws with a well-timed blade through the forehead of a Walker.
Gun combat also requires two hands. You can steady aim by bringing up one hand under the other, and reach down for ammo at your hip, and manually slot it into your gun. Shotguns require cocking, and bows need drawing back too. It adds to the immersion of struggling through, and escaping from, the mass of undead, and does a hell of a job in replicating the tension of such a battle from the show. While the game may not be as fluid as that, it’s impressive all the same.
Melee combat tends to suit the early parts of missions more, when you have a bit of distance on the emerging horde and can afford to dip in and out of buildings to grab supplies and fight off the odd straggler. It attracts less attention, and gets you in the rhythm of killing on the move. Once things get dicey, and you inevitably find yourself cornered, flicking between shoving, stabbing, and shooting becomes a familiar routine.
The issue with the upping of intensity is that none of the control options is especially handy for getting out of the way of the horde, and as such, wrestling with those controls can be quite tiring. By the time you’ve fought through undead, ran from danger repeatedly, and pilfered all you can, it won’t be all that surprising to find yourself a bit worn out. After all, it’s a lot of arm-swinging and head-popping. Some of that fruitlessly too, as the PSVR’s motion-tracking isn’t the most consistent.
It’s a good job you get a break in between runs then. Using the loot gathered on your runs, the town of Alexandria can be upgraded and restored to its former glory. It’s not an especially deep town management sim by any means, but it adds a tangible reward for your hard-earned battles. Alexandria is essentially a living museum you can wander about and tinker with. It’s nice enough, but it needs some life injected into it.
The major stopping point in this role-playing of the TV show is the visual presentation. Onslaught is, to put it kindly, a rugged-looking game. The color palette is naturally in keeping with the muted browns of the show, but it’s not the best look for the rather identikit streets you explore. The size of objects in the game world is a tad erratic, which also doesn’t do Onslaught any favors when it comes to maintaining immersion during lulls in the action.
Characters just about look like their real-life counterparts in a fuzzy kind of way, but considering we have seen what a high-fidelity Norman Reedus looks like, seeing this smudgy version of him is a very noticeable downgrade. This is offset by having the voice talents from the show involved, at least.
So The Walking Dead: Onslaught is by no means the worst video game adaptation of the hit graphic novel, nor the worst based on the TV show version (both honors go to 2013’s The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct), but it does fall well short of the natural standout (Telltale’s series) and more importantly, a bit behind VR stablemate Saints & Sinners. The combat is handled well, and replicates the frantic dexterity of the show’s protagonists when everything is going to hell. It’s just not particularly pleasant to look at or otherwise maneuver around. A strange complaint for what is already known as a dreary brown world of blood and rot? Sure, but even a dreary brown world of blood and rot can be better presented than it is in Onslaught. When you chuck in a non-event of a story, it leaves a slight taste of frustration.
I’m probably being a bit more down on it than it deserves, because this is a good zombie-smashing VR game, but it’s just good enough that the grievances I have with it feel magnified somewhat. I want it to be that little bit better than it is, but I’ll not deny that it may be easier for some to overlook these relatively minor faults.
The Walking Dead: Onslaught review code for PSVR provide by the publisher.
The Walking Dead: Onslaught is out now for PSVR and Compatible VR Headsets on PC.
‘AHS: Delicate’ concludes with one of ‘American Horror Story’s’ most disappointing finales that makes up its own rules, hammers in rote themes, and then turns to dust.
“When are they going to let us tell our own stories?”
A pregnancy brings genetic material together until it culminates into a person and American Horror Story: Delicate also tells a story where its success is dependent upon the season’s ability to tie all of its ideas together into a satisfying finale. Pregnancy stories are all about the ending and one’s enjoyment of “The Auteur” really comes down to what you want out of an American Horror Story finale. Anyone who’s watched the series has been burnt by past finales that are underbaked or overwrought. There are also only so many places that a season finale that begins with Anna in labor can go. Most pregnancy horror stories are going to culminate in this event, which really puts extra pressure on the finale’s success.
AHS: Delicate has tried to eat Rosemary’s Baby’s lunch all season and emerge as the predominant demon spawn pregnancy horror story. The problem with this is that it then still needs to concoct a conclusion that’s better than Rosemary’s Baby. “The Auteur” has its options limited from the start, which is never a good thing for American Horror Story. AHS: Delicate has been a messy experiment with many highs and lows. It does find a way to do something different with its finale, but unfortunately it’s not a very logical or gratifying approach. None of this helps make AHS: Delicate, as a whole, feel worthwhile and “The Auteur” is one of American Horror Story’s sloppiest episodes in a long time.
“The Auteur” is a mess, but it scratches the surface – just for a moment – of an interesting idea. This finale posits that IVF treatment is a modern form of magic that attempts to frame AHS: Delicate as a modern fairy tale where science is this generation’s Fairy Godmother. This could have been intriguing territory to explore this season, but AHS: Delicate comes in far too late with this concept and then does the bare minimum with it. It’s a really long walk to just get to a bloodier riff on Rumpelstiltskin or Sleeping Beauty. It’s Dead Ringers meets Dune’s Bene Gesserit. “The Auteur” drops clunky Biblical allusions so there’s zero confusion over any of the episode’s subtext, all of which is matched by the finale’s awkward presentation of the pains of motherhood. Women need to literally bleed and give their lifeforce for their children. It’s an unbalanced cycle, but who would have thought that being a mother requires selflessness?
Heavy-handed visuals fill “The Auteur,” some of which are powerful, despite their surface-level meanings. Anna grips her Oscar, rather than her husband’s hand, during her labor pains. It’s a perfect distillation of this season’s broad themes of fame versus family. Shortly after, Dex literally chokes to death on his own severed hand so that he can’t ever mansplain, interrupt or talk again. “The Auteur” pushes the idea that all men are ushered into the world to the sound of a screaming woman, but this also becomes the soundscape that complements Dex’s demise. It’s more of AHS: Delicate repeatedly underlining the same message.
The Satanic Midwives have been one of AHS: Delicate’s most effective pieces of disturbing imagery. It’s particularly unhinged to see all of these figures gossiping together in Anna’s ear like they’re Stepford Cuckoos or Wicked Stepsisters. This brings out Cara Delevingne, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, and Kim Kardashian’s most playful performances of the season. They tap into a really uncomfortable energy where everybody just lets loose and goes for it. For a moment it’s as if Barbie Land were set in Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge – and not in a good way. It’s a bewildering spectacle.
Evidently, what this whole season has been building towards is not just the birth of Anna’s child, but the beginning of a new matriarchal utopia where evil eugenics reign supreme. Men are chastised for generations of destruction while these women still perpetuate their own toxic breed of gender-based thinking that’s rich in exclusion and abuse. These Midwives are so deluded that they can earnestly talk about a perfect tomorrow and male sex slaves in the same breath. It really feels as if Halley Feiffer just watched Barbie, Dune, and Rosemary’s Baby at the same time at 1.5x speed and then called it a day. There’s no room for this eccentric experiment to breathe.
Anna’s baby, while the season’s focal point, really becomes a blood red herring and afterthought in “The Auteur.” This finale instead examines whether Anna will join Siobhan and her Satanic Midwives to become part of this generational curse; like a pregnancy It Follows, so to speak. This is actually a unique and interesting angle that focuses on a relatively original aspect of pregnancy horror that never pulls focus from the mother. However, “The Auteur” produces too many ideas that are too lofty to cram into a single episode. As wild as all of this is, it could have actually worked if it just had a few episodes of deeper development.
“The Auteur” bombards the audience with evocative tableaus that are ultimately shallow and make no sense, like Siobhan watering a plant with blood or snow owls in cages. It’s hard not to take it personally when Anna repeatedly screams in confusion while Siobhan tells her – and the audience – that they’re stupid for not understanding and she continually spouts platitudes like, “It’s a beautiful day to make mayhem.” Exposition is expelled from Siobhan like morning sickness for 3/4 of the episode.
There’s a very disjointed nature to not just “The Auteur,” but the entire second-half of AHS: Delicate. The whole season was written before the SAG-AFTRA strike, but the abundance of 30-minute episodes during Part 2 makes me seriously curious if there were availability issues during the second-half of filming. It feels like certain scenes were removed or replaced with other characters to help fill in gaps. That’s not to say that more scenes would have explained many of the season’s unanswered questions or ended this all in a satisfying manner. However, it just feels lazy to have so many episodes — including the finale — come in so short.
Once AHS: Delicate is done with laborious exposition it drops some revelatory bombshells that barely detonate, like the news that Dex is actually Siobhan’s son. This builds to a truly egregious final act where Siobhan gets skeletized to dust because Anna happens to read the right magical Hestia chant that breaks her Satanic spell. Apparently women can have it all, in the end – fame, family, and a coven. That’s the profound insight that American Horror Story: Delicate has to impart after nine episodes.
What? Excuse me? Why didn’t Adeline just chant Siobhan and company to death back in 2013 then? “The Auteur” is a genuinely baffling season finale to one of American Horror Story’s most forgettable seasons.
There’s so much focus on the buildup in pregnancy horror stories that the aftermath seldom receives the same attention. It’s rare that films or series stick around and chronicle a lengthier span of the child’s complicated life to see what lies ahead. This is ultimately a different story with unique themes and aims, but AHS: Delicate might have hit a little harder if it actually got into what’s next for Anna’s child. In a season that’s certainly taken its time and guilty of meandering, it wouldn’t have been impossible for Anna to give birth in episode eight instead of the finale. Halley Feiffer is interested in the mother of this “perfect product,” not the perfect product itself. However, fans are still going to be naturally curious over what happens with it next. “The Auteur” is an easy birth for American Horror Story: Delicate, albeit one that’s succeeded by a perplexing recovery period that makes up radical rules – some of which feel like they’re written by a baby – before it just abruptly ends.
There were exciting prospects behind this American Horror Story season, especially with a fresh showrunner. However, Delicate feels obligatory and definitely one of the anthology series’ weakest seasons (and easily the least interesting Emma Roberts character). This stings even more after AHS: NYC’s strength and how it signaled that this series still might have a few more good stories to left to tell. “The Auteur” couldn’t be more different than AHS: NYC’s “Requiem 1981/1987 Part One & Two” and it’s a dopey, disappointing, disorienting note to go out on. Execution is everything and AHS: Delicate doesn’t nail the horror or camp enough to be one of the cool kids. Delicate is instead destined to be bullied by Rosemary’s Baby, Immaculate, Mother! and L’Interieur for being a plodding, pointless endeavor.
It can pick on False Positive though. It’s better than that.
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