Parents' Guide to The Walking Dead: Road to Survival

This strategy-adventure game faithfully recreates the setting of the graphic novel and rewards violent, bloodthirsty gameplay. At its heart, the Walking Dead is about survival -- either by cooperation or selfishness. In a world where civilization has disintegrated and it's every man or woman for him- or herself, what kind of person would you be? The aptly named Road to Survival effectively asks this question by recreating the horror of the graphic novels and by making players face their gut-wrenching moral dilemmas. To create a secure sanctuary, players need three things: food, weapons, and experienced fighters. All of these things come from outside the town's barbed-wire walls, and getting them involves fighting off waves of zombies and/or hostile humans. Collectible characters specialize in different things: guns, melee combat, and healing. Those you like, you keep and organize into five-person teams. Those you don't can be turned into currency.

As with most free-to-play games, advancing is faster and easier if you spend some money, but The Walking Dead: Road to Survival gives you more free gameplay than some. Granted, the in-game chat window is a pointless (and obscenity-filled) distraction, and it would be nice if collecting resources wasn't such an outright pain in the rump. (Scopely must recognize the latter; hence their inclusion of the auto-play button.) On the upside, the various game modes give you plenty of ways to test your apocalyptic mettle: Story Mode, Factions (join forces with other players in World at War events), Raids, (raid other players' bases for reputation and reward), Road Map events, and Survival Road tournaments. All this makes the app well worth downloading if you're over 17, and its hair-raising, strategic combat and complex moral dilemmas make it more than just another zombie-killing gore-fest.