The Walking Dead: Michonne - Episode 1: In Too Deep (PlayStation 4) Review

The character of Michonne is well loved in the original Walking Dead comics and now also in the Walking Dead TV show. Portrayed in both as a quiet, yet deadly killing machine, she's become quite the iconic character, with her signature Katana and pet zombies. In the comics, Michonne is quite a different character. After a harrowing arc dealing with Negan and his Saviours - read the comics, you have to read the comics, they are superb - Michonne feels the need to get away, vanishing for seven issues and then just arriving back at camp aboard a boat. What happened to her while she was away was never really explained… until now.

It's testament to the quality of the previous The Walking Dead games from Telltale that the creator of the whole series, Robert Kirkman, trusted the team to tell her story. Michonne had a terribly traumatic experience at the beginning of the zombie apocalypse and it's stuck with her throughout. The recent events of the comics compared to everything else has just piled up and left Michonne with some serious mental issues and emotional baggage. This is superbly conveyed in the game, showing her mental state deteriorating as her sense of reality falls away around her and spectres from her past break into her real life. It's an effective method of adding a psychological twist to what would otherwise just be the usual zombie jump scares.

Sadly, this interesting twist in the story is the only thing that really feels new. Perhaps it's just zombie fatigue from the comics, the TV show and the previous Telltale The Walking Dead titles, but the story throughout feels like it's treading water. The characters feel forgettable and there's no real twist or hook to keep the tension up. The dialogue and storytelling are top form Telltale, but for some reason, the entirety of the episode just feels shallow.

Being a Telltale game, the regular Quick-Time Events return for player interactions and for combat are back, so expect to see Michonne slicing up zombies left, right, and centre - literally. By swiping the analogue left and right, with the occasional face button press thrown in for good measure, she dishes out the carnage. The combat looks great, and zombies are dissected and eviscerated in fantastically gory and stylish ways, making for some of the coolest looking QTE sequences in a Telltale title thus far. The team also makes the most of this by including plenty of QTE sections in this first episode.