Stern Pinball's The Walking Dead (V.1.19)

Here's an all new look at Stern's latest game, The Walking Dead. This one here at Modern Pinball NYC of course is the standard "Pro" edition. The day before I filmed this Stern made an announcement they where going to be running a premium edition model. It seems the 600 limited editions sold out and now their going to finally run a full featured one. I much prefer the LE's art package of looking like the hospital doors in the first episode ("DON'T OPEN DEAD INSIDE") to a color version of the actors on the sides.

Speaking of the actors none of the actors of the show have any dialog in the game. Not even clips from the show. It's all people doing southern accents which, for me takes a lot away from the game. Even if they only had one from the show it'd still be better then somebody doing a poor imitation of Darrel from the show.

Since the game was designed by John Borg a lot of people have been comparing this to his other games like X-Men and Metallica. The ramps feel like steeper versions of Metallica and the middle C-Block Prison is just like Sparky, complete with the magnet so it doesn't send the ball straight down the middle of the flippers. There's also a bash toy of the Well Walker from the second season of the show many fans have dubbed, "Wellverine" The two big problems with this toy are you need a really solid hit to rock it in order to register a shot and the right arm covers up the last few letters in PRISON which can be a pain if you don't know how far you are into spelling it to start up the multiball mode.

Right now the game feels kind of sparse to me. You can do different modes that correspond to the different shots like the right ramp being the Arena from season 3 and the left ramp is the CDC from the first season. You just combo the ramp over and over again to build up points and naturally you want to stack them with the Well Walker or Prison multiball. You also get some "Multi-Kill" modes that build up points faster but due to the sound being down I had no idea how I started them.

I'm still looking forward to see what the team will do with further software upgrades, so until then we'll keep you posted on how the game's shaping up. It's kind of bland now, but so where games like Star Trek and Spider-Man so lets see what will happen in the future.