Walking Dead Season 2 Episode 3: In Harm's Way Review

      We're in the middle of Season 2 of The Walking Dead. Maybe that's why this episode was a little slower paced than usual. Not that being slow paced is bad in itself. Something just seemed a little off this time around, at least for the first hour or so of the game. Don't worry, this is still a great episode with a lot of developments and interesting choices, and quite a few interesting new characters that I enjoyed a lot. I also want to point out that playing 400 Days, while not at all required for enjoyment, is really starting to add some significant meaning to what is going on now if you have played it. Although part of what happens in this episode does not match up with my results from 400 Days. That's just a preview of my ranting about these games loading saves right that is coming up.

     So how did it run this time around? Pretty good, in general. The load times are still disturbingly long in places, and almost every scene started with a weird framerate glitch that made it look like you just fast forwarded into the scene, but beyond that it ran pretty well. I did have another big problem though...

     At the end of the episode, the “My Choices” screen came up blank for me. And now when I select “My Choices” from the main menu, there is no entry for episode 3. Looking at my choices and the statistics of what percentage of players did the same thing you did is one of my favorite things about The Walking Dead. It's fascinating to see how sometimes the majority of players agree with you on a hard decision, but disagree with you on something you thought was pretty obvious. I'm feeling a lack of closure on the episode without this review at the end. Very disappointing. I'm also terrified that my choices aren't going to load right into episode 4, especially since season 1's decision didn't properly import for me into season 2, as I talked about in my posts about Episode 1 and earlier in this post. These failures are more than a petty glitch; they're more like a failure of the game to operate. I can only hope that my choices are buried somewhere in the saved data and will load into episode 4.
     Because of this problem and because the beginning of the episode felt a little off, this is the first Walking Dead episode I'm giving a score of Great Game, Tier 3. It's still amazing and a great experience with some real interesting stuff, but this time around, the story wasn't so absorbing that it pulled my mind away from the technical flaws, especially since the main technical flaw this time around was story-related. Still, I love The Walking Dead and can't wait for what is next, and I really enjoyed this episode too! Check out my spoiler post for my choices!