It has been a long wait for the third episode in the latest Walking Dead series from Telltale Games. After releasing the opening two episodes as a big premier just one week after the Batman series finale, it has been over three months in waiting for Above the Law to carry on the story of Javier and his group. I was not impressed with the opening to this third full season but often the middle episode can bolster both the story and gameplay, but will it work this time?
*Spoiler warning for previous episodes ahead*
When we last saw Javier and co, things had gone from bad to total tragedy. The group’s attempt to steal fuel from the New Frontier collective ending up with an assault on them that left Kate shot and hurt whilst cruelly killing Mariana as she was enjoying a rather happy moment. In desperate need of medical help for Kate, the group risk it all by approaching the settlement of Richmond, the home of the group that had attacked them. The final moments saw the reveal that one of the leaders of Richmond was actually David, husband of Kate, father of Gabe and Mariana and brother of Javier…dun dun daaaaah!
Episode 3 picks up with Javier dealing with this revelation but at the same time scared and battling to get Kate help and his group into safety. Above the Law is very much focused on Javier more so than previous episodes, with every dialogue encounter having the feeling that each response will shape the relationships Javier is still forging and needs to forge to progress. It felt like a nice change of pace to have just one main character to focus on and the slowness allows the player to make more reasoned choices in the decision making dialogue scenes. I actually came away from this episode liking his character far more than from both opening episodes to A New Frontier.
Catching up with David as a character was rather hit and miss sadly, he took the news of the death of his own daughter at the hands of the very group he is leading felt rushed, this may be down to him being a former military man but I had expected more character reaction than simply having the hint he may get his own revenge on the murderer. We saw in the opening episode that David is a bit of a git, and that side to him is more impactful in this episode as we learn what happened to him after he disappeared and how he survived and found himself in Richmond. Just as with episodes 1 and 2, the narrative elements that Telltale have used to build this Walking Dead universe are starting to show their age, and its getting a little tired to yet again have to learn about another group of survivors being under the boot of a dictatorship style leadership in order to keep them safe from threats. There is simply a total lack of anything really original now and it struggles to reuse everything that Walking Dead fans know so well.
Action also plays a big part in this episode but again, it is so mundane now that taking on multiple walkers and spending minutes doing QTE mini games and pressing buttons and directions to complete them felt repetitious and tedious by the end of the episode. Though the animations are but brutal and visceral now, encounters with walkers just have no impact anymore for me. A moment in the later stages to the episode will give Javier a chance for revenge but it felt clumsy as the game tries to give you the player a chance to shape Javier by either having him stop before he goes too far or risk the disgust of the group by taking his revenge fully. The attempt by the other characters to make me as Javier, feel guilty for taking my revenge as I did felt needless and the lack of real understanding as to why Javier did it lost some of the group togetherness that previous character interactions had built up. The writing is simply trying to keep the player always guessing about what they are doing but the story and gameplay simply never made me care enough either way in a decision.
Overall I am still not invested enough in A New Frontier to really care about these new characters. The use of Clementine as a side character once again feels show horned in, with her flashback segments giving some insight into her events before the game starts but not enough to really understand why she is still hanging around. The pacing was good until the rather sharp ending and again this episode failed to end with a “next time on the walking dead” so failed to give me any real reason to look forward to episode four, instead it chose to link me to perhaps by the original season. Now I actually have replayed the first season in the time it has taken to get to this new episode, and it only served to show just how lacking A New Frontier is in delivering that same experience as Lee and Clementine back then. Nothing feels new, it all feels tired and after three episodes it is still about a group of nice survivors feeling the pressure and trying to either deal or avoid a larger menacing group of survivors.
The attempts at story twists are far too obvious to really add anything and whilst this episode was the most enjoyable so far, I still have that meh feeling from playing the premier episodes back at the end of 2016. Telltale will need to release Episode four on time and much quicker but I sense this series is really just time filler until their next big and new series in Guardians of the Galaxy. Everything just feels like it is going through the motions and ticking all the check boxes that Telltale use for their Walking Dead games, and ironically, A New Frontier is more like a Walker than a survivor at this point.
