Review: The Walking Dead: No Time Left

Game Reviews
Review: The Walking Dead: No Time Left
By Sean Booker
November 22, 2012 - 11:28

Studios: Telltale Games
Rating: M (Mature)
Genre: Adventure Game
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC, iOS
Players: 1

There will be no spoilers in this review.

Episode five of Telltale Games’s The Walking Dead series, titled No Time Left, sees the season’s finale in a grand and emotional way. The episode is nicely paced and does a good job of showing you how the choices you made throughout the series will come back to impact you. There are a number of really great moments in this piece of content and the overall package is a great final episode to this very interesting game.

What will stand out most to you in No Time Left is the number of tough choices, strange decisions and the level of tension you’ll be faced with. The episode starts off incredibly strong, forcing you to make one of the hardest decisions to date in the game’s entirety and it continues downward from there. And you’ll be given a few moments throughout to have some really good discussions with some of these characters you’ve gone through all this with. The final moments are a great few minutes you’ll experience.

Gone are the annoying action sequences from the last few episodes and in their place are a number of different movements sections. Instead of fighting off zombies for any sense of action, No Time Left primarily makes you to move your character forward through weird and very tense areas. For example, walking slowly past a crowd of zombies or gingerly walking across a rickety bridge. These sections seem to fit the feel of the game better since the shooting in the last episode specifically was a huge turn off. And though you may find that you will play this type of section one too many times during the episode, it’s good that each one is usually very intense and brings a new feeling of danger.

You will easily notice how this episode is trying to show off how your past choices in the series are paying off now. Specific characters will apologize for how they acted or thank you for what you did beforehand. These even play out in how some characters act toward each other and who decides to stick close to who. Though it may be a little transparent when presenting you with this information, it’s at least nice to see some pay off. However, it would have been nice to be given a huge info dump at the end of the whole thing to see specifically what could have been done to change things. That may break some of the illusion that The Walking Dead worked so hard to build up, but I’m sure a lot of people, myself included, would love to know how else it could have turned out.

The ending is also a great moment and worked well with what the players have had to deal with leading up to it. Though it is easy to see how, from a game mechanics standpoint, all the diverging threads set up needed to come back together. The last scene is specifically setup to work in almost anyone’s personal story and that is a little depressing. However, overall it still stands as a good ending and there’s plenty left open for the recently announced second season.

No Time Left is a great finale to what was a wonderful series of episodic content from Telltale Games. It was nice to see how a lot of my decisions changed things and the choices specific to this episode were some of the hardest I’ve had to make. There are definitely some cool moments to this episode and fans are sure to enjoy how it ends and what is being put into place for what’s to come.
Rating: 10/10