Mobile Watch: Learning Survival Tactics With The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land

Following Telltale’s landmark adaptation of The Walking Dead, no other studio has come close to realising Kirman and Moore’s grounded vision of the zombie apocalypse. Whenever the name gets mentioned, many of us conjure up an image of AMC’s hit TV show, yet The Walking Dead actually started life as comic book series, debuting more than a decade ago. Even today it’s still going strong, having just celebrated its 147th issue.

Despite this wealth of source material, video game adaptations have not only been few and far between, but sporadic in quality. Bar Telltale’s two-season saga and a couple of fun yet throwaway mobile spin-offs, all we’ve had is a ropey first person shooter in the form of Survival Instinct. It may have allowed fans to live out their Dixon brother roadtrip fantasies but for many the game was simply unplayable. Even as a hardened fan, I couldn’t play more than a few hours without having to put it down for good.

Thankfully, with a new co-op shooter on the way from PayDay developer Overkill, it looks as if fan’s fortunes are set to change. In the meantime, however, we have yet another Walking Dead spin-off to sink your teeth into, this time on mobile.

Developed by Helsinki based studio, Next Games, No Man’s Land isn’t y’our typical Clash of Clans reskin. Although tagged with many of the same free-to-play tropes, it’s far more fun and thoughtful than your typical ‘me too’ cash cows. Although not for everyone, with season six of The Walking Dead having just started, No Man’s Land is bound to attract a sizeable following.

It all kicks off with three survivors managing to escape the Terminus compound. After being rescued by fan favourite, Daryl Dixon, they’re led to a small encampment before being left to fend for themselves.

Starting out with a small cluster of facilities, it’s your job to cultivate resources while expanding the settlement to accommodate more survivors. It’s this part of the game that should feel instantly familiar to those who play regularly on mobile devices. Everything, from training recruits to constructing buildings, is all done in real time. By design, No Man’s Land is the kind of game that encourages players to check in every few hours to make sure everything is ticking over nicely.

For those craving something a little more substantive, the game also features a turn-based combat system that continues to grow more complex the longer you play. From camp you’ll be able to embark on a series of missions, each one unlocking new gear and additional resources.
They all follow a fairly similar structure. After being deployed in the combat area, players are tasked with completing a straightforward objective before making a dash for the escape point. These objectives can vary though typically revolve around interacting with objects such as gates, doors, and supply crates.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Walking Dead game without zombies. Sure enough, as you explore each area, you’ll come across roaming packs of braindead walkers. Although fairly easy to dispatch at first, No Man’s Land has a timer at the bottom of the screen, throwing increasingly bigger waves at you the longer you wait around.

This change of pace can be unnerving at first yet perfectly captures that feeling of being overrun. Unless your survivors happen to be incredibly overpowered, you’ll always need to think carefully about an escape route while keeping an eye on their health.

As briefly mentioned before, everything in this part of the game is turn based. Whether you’re moving survivors between grid spaces of attacking walker, it’s all done using a small array of simple touchscreen gestures. It’s a fun and easy system to get behind, occasionally refreshed by new character and enemy types. Obviously it doesn’t quite match games like XCOM in terms of finesse and complexity but this doesn’t really matter. Where those games are designed for multi-hour sessions, No Man’s Land has been scaled down, making it suitable for short bursts of play.

Inevitably we were going to discuss microtransactions at some point. Where plenty of free-to-play games have unfairly put the rinse on players, it actually feels like The Walking Dead provides good value for money. Straight off the bat you are given a sizeable stack of gold which can be used to shorten build and upgrade times. The amount of gold needed will ramp up as structures become more advanced, yet it does so at a discounted rate.

Upon completing missions, players will be able to select three unmarked lockboxes out of a possible nine. These will include resources like experience, gold, and food, but can also harbour rare gear and radios (used to recruit new survivors). Thankfully, this is the only part of the game in which I experienced adverts and even then they are completely optional. By tapping on them you’re given a further three lockboxes to open – a trade off definitely worth making.

As The Walking Dead’s sixth season moves forward I’ll no doubt continue to dip into No Man’s Land. Although I don’t always have time for the combat missions, I still enjoy upgrading my settlement and keeping an eye out for upcoming content.