The Walking Dead: Survivors

I have been playing this game for four months now. The game is very robust app and is modeled after the television show and the comic where you can fight zombies to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. You start with an entry level community and by battling zombies and other players you can grow your own town into a very strong one by collecting resources, building in your town, and battling enemies. A key element in this process is to find Survivors who each provide their own benefits and specialties. There are many features in the game that help you grow. Clan and individual chats let you communicate with other members. You can recruit new Survivors by broadcasting to find new ones, purchase fragments of Survivors in stores, or find their fragments on the map. Several features within your town such as farms and lumber yards allow you to build resources that you can then use to build more buildings, train troops, and resource technologies. Once your town gets strong enough you can join a clan. Clans are groups of players that come together to help each other out. If you join a good clan then most players are active and helpful and the clan constantly improves itself to gain benefits for its members. There are many events where you can gain rewards by battling the environment or other players, try your hand at a wheel of fortune, overcome challenges, and get rewards for accomplishing tasks. It is possible to play this game for free, but it also provides frequent opportunities to spend money on the game in order to leap ahead through the purchase of resources, Survivors, and coins (rubies) to purchase resources and tools such as clothing, weapons, and vehicles. Be aware, some of these items can be quite expensive and it is not uncommon to encounter players that have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars in this game. From a technical perspective the game is great, offering smooth flow, lots of variety, opportunities to build positive relationships with others both in and across clans, and chances to develop problem-solving skills and strategic thinking. If this was the only aspect of this game to consider I would likely give it 5 stars. However, there is a dark side to this zombie world. The structure of the game allows and even encourages stronger players to pick on weaker players. The difference in the strengths of players that grow rapidly, frequently through the expenditure of large amounts of money, allows the development of stronger players that are virtually untouchable by other players that do not have the financial freedom to invest immense amounts of money into the game. Events reward these strong players for killing other player’s troops and stealing their resources. In many cases the weaker players can do nothing to protect themselves unless they spend all of their resources to purchase shields, which in turn make it extremely difficult to grow stronger. This has resulted in groups of these super-players banding together to bully and terrorize everyone else. The chat feature also shows its dark side here. While many words are censored, many others are not, and it is not difficult to insert other characters into words to split letters apart, or to use abbreviations or spelling variants. The result often turns into a bigoted derogatory and often sex-related free-for-all with players saying obscene and abusive things to other players that are not censored. I have taken several screen shots of over-the-top chats. I have seen several players quit because of this, and I believe that this scars some of them emotionally. A majority of the players I encountered in the game, while they love the other players in their clan, are beaten down, discouraged, angry, frustrated, and resentful. Players also frequently submit derogatory images in the chats. Technical support does not appear to care about these situations, and does not seem to even respond to such complaints, assuming you can even get a complaint to them. I frequently encountered software errors when trying to submit complaints after I submitted my first complaint. Altogether, if you’re looking for a technically sound game then this is a strong contender, but I would most assuredly keep my children away from it, and if you do not like to be insulted or textually abused, then I recommend that you stay away as well.