The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners - Aftershocks by developer and publisher Skydance Interactive—PC preview written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
With an incredible virtual reality journey behind me with Skydance Interactive's The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, yesterday marked the launch of the latest addition to this experience, Aftershocks. While once trying to survive a fairly "calm" environment with walkers roaming around after your journey has ended, new supplies from The Reserve have washed up and everyone who couldn't get their hands on them before are now out in droves to rectify previous shortcomings.
Now, originally after having fought through in order to get to the reserve, taking what you possibly could and then heading back “home” to your bus, after a few days of quiet the radio if set to channel 47 in going to start to play different messages than the ones you would have previously been hearing.
Now, instead of just being told where the hordes could or could not be at certain times of the day or where small caches of meds and food could be found, you’re now going to get messages telling you where new caches have popped up and what kind of a time you’re in for if you want them for yourself. In the hands of either the Reclaimed or the Tower, one thing is for sure, they are both out for your blood so shooting first and looting later will generally be your best option unless you’re REALLY good at sneaking around.
In my excitement last month, I thought that I was getting to see new stuff early and could bring you a preview of the content before Nick’s full PlayStation VR review, but instead, I got to see what was already there which was fun in its own right. Didn’t get to fully update your crafting tables? Didn’t unlock everything you could between your melee, ranged and medical items? You were given a chance to top off these items on your list at your pace with ideas of where small caches could be found alongside some death squads of Reclaimed or of the Tower could be found.
I’m actually happy that it wasn’t the Aftershocks if only because I had been worried before of not having a comparison and now I do. So for the Aftershocks, this obviously happens once you have completed the main campaign and honestly the additions are pretty impressive especially for free DLC that has been made available for both the PC and the PlayStation simultaneously. Now, while still getting new updates through channel 47, your quest log will update with a path to follow in order to get your hands on “the goods”.
After having gone through a few of these quests, I was happy to see that they didn’t all follow the same format but instead kept enhancing the experience with some new challenges. Set in the same locations as before, the dead have continued to increase in number, the available resources have continued to dwindle and the humans left are really unhappy to see your face. If they can see your face. So for these scenarios, you are given an idea of where to look and once you’re there you’ll have to adjust accordingly.
Video source: PlayStation Blog
For these new caches that contain a stupid amount of supplies, how you open them will all depend on the scenario that you find yourself in. Some may be locked by a key in the hands of someone else that you need to hunt down. Others can have already been opened and the supplies “are in another castle” making you relate very much to the famous plumber searching for his princess. Others, others have been brought into a location that is just creepy to search for it making you wonder what’s worse, the zombies / walkers prowling around in the dark or the trip wires that aren’t attached to cans but to propane tanks that will kill you faster than you know what happened as the game over screen comes up.
Now for the caches themselves, just wow. I didn't think I could think of anything really in the vein as a kid on Christmas morning but holy crap was there a lot of stuff packed into those containers. Ammo. Food. Medication. Ammo. Resource boxes. Weapons. Ammo. Did I say ammo? Seriously, getting your hands on over two-hundred shotgun shells makes you slightly reconsider for a while just how stealthy you really want to be. I quite literally brought on the pain after that one.
Summary
Now, not to not spoil everything that could be found in this brand new update, as I’ll leave some secrets to be discovered for yourselves, I will say that Aftershocks is a good reason to head back into The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners especially since the update is free. For a game already this well crafted? It doesn’t get better than that!
Score: N/A
