The Walking Dead: Season Two Episode 1 - All That Remains Reviews
Whilst not quite in the same league as the previous season's episodes, All That Remains offers a potentially intriguing character arc for Clem, which helps paper over shortcomings in the overall storyline.
'All That Remains' is either the start to a great second season or the beginning of the end for a once great series. I simply don't know, and I won't know until getting into the rest of the season. The potential and the set-up is there, which is the baseline for a jumping off point. It could just be so-so, but then that would be a disappointment.
Not a bad start to the second season but not a great one either, with a formless plot and unusually weak characterisation.
All That Remains establishes characters and conflicts that may pay off in forthcoming episodes, but it doesn't stand up well on its own.
The second season of 2012 game of the year builds a strong basis for success, but there are fears it may have lost sight of what made The Walking Dead so good to begin with
Letting go of the past can be hard, especially if it's a past you have great fondness for, but sometimes letting go is necessary in order to move on. Perhaps that is a lesson both Clementine and the players controlling her will learn together during the course of The Walking Dead: Season Two.
While there's an intriguing setup here, 'All That Remains' starts the new season off slowly and fails to deliver a sensible and concrete outlook at the future. There are notably fewer meaningful choices to be found and the action scenes are without much suspense as Clementine is far too susceptible to be grabbed by a walker.
In a way, the game, too, is a shell of what it once was. Season one was a slow build and a horrible pull. There was a lot of humanity to it, focusing on its characters above anything else. The sequel has a lot of that pull, but none of that subtlety or ease. So far, it's just a list of tragic events. This is, of course, just the first episode. As we've learned from the first game, it only gets worse from here. Maybe it'll also get better.
And talking of superior versions, once again the PC reins supreme. The stuttering and freezing issues that have always plagued the console versions are entirely absent from the Steam game, and the game looks gorgeous at a crisp 1080p – its expressive faces and soft colours doing wonders to mask a presumably modest budget. What more can be said? The benchmark narrative game of the last generation has come back just as strong and just as skilfully as before. You should already be playing it.
While it's not the strongest Walking Dead chapter we've seen—the episode's final choice, in particular, is somewhat baffling—it's prudent to withhold final judgment until the rest of the game is in.
Here's hoping, however, that [the series] hasn't lost sight of the smaller threads that made its previous epic yarn great. The moments that forced players to care about characters who weren't technically extensions of themselves.