The Walking Dead: Streets of Survival looks cool and starts strong, but its frustrating gunfights and repetitive missions stop it from becoming the proper co-op zombie brawler it should have been
The Walking Dead has been turned into pretty much every kind of game by now, so a 2.5D pixel-art brawler was not what I expected next. Yet Streets of Survival makes a genuinely good first impression. Its chunky 2D characters run around low-poly 3D environments that give the whole thing a weird little diorama look. Seeing Rick, Daryl, and Michonne tearing through walkers in this style is immediately cool.
The setup pulls from the later All-Out War part of the TV show, where Rick and his group fight Negan and the Saviors. I stopped watching around the season finale where Negan used Lucille to bash the brains out of Invincible, so I really have no idea what happened next in the show. Still, it feels close enough to the show that dedicated fans will get more from the references and locations.
At first, bashing walkers is satisfying. You have a basic attack that chains into a short combo, and pressing Triangle after three hits unleashes a big finishing strike that explodes walkers and Saviors. There are three main playable characters in Rick, Daryl, and Michonne, with Negan becoming available later. They all have their own skill trees, where you can upgrade things like stronger attacks and extra bullets, more starting bandages etc.
Michonne was easily my favorite. Her katana has more reach than the other characters' weapons, making it much easier to keep enemies at a sensible distance. You can also grab temporary axes, pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles. They are useful when a crowd gets out of hand, but break or run dry so quickly that they are brief panic buttons rather than tools you can build a strategy around.
The scavenging fits the world, and the small skill trees feel worthwhile. The problem is the human enemies with guns. Saviors shoot relentlessly, sometimes from off-screen, and your answer is one dodge roll on a cooldown. When several enemies are firing while walkers close in, the action becomes a messy scramble where you get hit and probably die.
Even on Easy, Streets of Survival is more challenging than I expected. I do not mind learning timing, but this often feels punishing for reasons outside my control. Healing with a bandage takes what feels like three business days, leaving you vulnerable. The 2.5D perspective also brings the usual genre problems: wonky hitboxes, attacks that should connect but do not, and imprecise positioning.
That makes the lack of co-op especially strange. This feels like a game designed for couch co-op, where one player can pull attention while the other deals with the gunmen, and where dying in a ridiculous situation becomes funny instead of annoying. I do not care if the TV characters were alone in a specific mission. Let two Daryls run around together. Let two Ricks bash zombies. It is a video game. Even Blades & Battles, a much weaker brawler overall, has local co-op. Streets of Survival feels poorer for leaving it out.
The bosses do help break up the samey mission structure. They ask a little more from you than simply clearing another room full of walkers and human enemies, and those encounters bring back some of the tension the regular fights lose. They are a reminder that the game has good ideas underneath its rough edges. It also has a few different walker types, character-specific moves, collectibles, optional objectives, and enough progression to make replaying missions feel slightly more purposeful after Negan joins the roster.
Still, the repetition arrives quickly. You kill the same walkers, then a shit ton of Saviors, then another group with guns. There is not enough variation in how those groups behave or how you deal with them to keep the combat as fresh as it was at the start. Its 2.5D setup reminded me more of Double Dragon Neon, another side-scrolling brawler where moving up and down the combat plane can make spacing and hitboxes feel awkward. Streets of Survival looks much cooler, but it runs into a similar problem when attacks that appear lined up fail to connect.
For Walking Dead fans, this is still a decent way to spend a few hours revisiting the show’s characters and smashing heads. The pixel-art presentation looks great, Michonne is fun to play, and the early combat has a satisfying snap. Just be ready for a game that becomes more frustrating and repetitive the longer it goes on, especially once every other enemy decides to pull out a gun. Thanks for reading!
