The Walking Dead: Final Season – Episode 3 Review

If you’ve been playing along with the final season of The Walking Dead, you know the game is heading for an interesting, hopefully shocking, end. And the development team is working hard at bringing the game in for a final landing when Episode 4 launches later this year. But we are one step away, and after completing Episode 3, we are excited for what is next!

It’s a war of hostage taking in Episode 3, with Clementine holding onto Able, and Lily holding a number of the kids from the boarding school. How Clementine deals with Able during interrogation moments is one of the better examples of feeling like there are consequences to the things you choose, and how you decide to fish information out of your hostage. It’s moments like these that you wish were present consistently throughout the Walking Dead experience.

This episode is really broken down into two parts. The beginning explores the humanity that still might exist in Walkers, as well as nurtures the relationships between the remaining survivors, who would ultimately prefer peaceful negotiations over hostile takeovers. There are close moments between characters that really build the story up as we head into the finale, but also group dynamics that seem to be shifting, as evidenced during the party that is thrown. Memories, at first pleasant, quickly become soured when the realization sets in of how many people have been lost.

The opening moments serve as a way to humanize the story again, to remind players that there is more than murdering zombies and staying alive. There are relationships, people lost, and much more. Mind you, this all gets set aside during the second half, during the raid on Lilly’s base, which highlights the other main aspect of the Walking Dead series: combat and bloodshed.

The final moments of “Broken Toys” gives the end game numerous possibilities, and while we won’t spoil those here, there were things that happened as the episode closed that I wasn’t expecting, shrouding the final episode in more mystery than ever before. What will happen? Who will prevail? Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long!