Walking Dead: Michonne Episode 1 (PS4)

The Walking Dead: Michonne puts you — for the first time — in control of an actual character from the comic book, in this new Telltale Games miniseries.

The game never explains when and where this fits into the Walking Dead timeline, but if you’re up to date on your comics, this is set between issues #126 and #139. For people not caught up on the comics or confused because they only watch the TV Show, this will not spoil anything about either of those things. Well, at least not in the first episode.

Episode 1 has a strong start and introduction to Michonne; setting up her mental struggles with PTSD; her tough girl attitude and attempts to try and use that to hide her emotions and, of course, her kick-ass ability to kill zombies. Assuming you’ve read the comics or watched the TV Series, you will know how much a bad-ass Michonne is, but you know she has had a tough time since the apocalypse. If you’ve only played the previous two seasons of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, well, you might struggle to get your head around Michonne as the game expects you to know her to some degree.

She meets Pete and joins him on his boat with two other guys. They, unfortunately, get stuck in the middle of the water when they hit a sunken ship and Pete and Michonne head to a wharf in the distance to look for a way to free their boat. Regular Telltale affair occur. You will look around the wharf and you will QTE your way through some zombies.

The combat scenes in this episode seem more visceral than most of what Telltale has done. It’s most comparable to some of the Fables Season 1 fights, but it’s definitely more fun and faster than the fight scenes in the first two series of The Walking Dead before this one. Michonne can use a machete like a boss.

When you eventually meet the bad guys, you will be somewhat bored. There just so unimagined. The leader of the group isn’t very interesting or scary, and neither is the second in command who is playing the ‘look at me! I’m crazy and violent’ character.

You’ll meet two other characters who are captured by the group and neither of them are interesting either. Given the choices, I just chose to protect my ass as best as I could and couldn’t have cared less if they had died– even if the game was trying ever so hard to make me want to save them.

Apart from Pete, I didn’t care for any other character and that’s a big minus in a Telltale game. Luckily it isn’t a snooze because Michonne is an interesting character and she get’s a really good performance here from Samira Wiley. If episode 2 has anything I’m looking forward to, it’s simply playing Michonne more.

Michonne’s mental battles make for the most interesting part in this first episode. But with only two left and with the characters being as lackluster as they are, you’re left with a lot to desire from this Telltale miniseries.