The Walking Dead: A New Frontier Review (Hot Traveler)
I hate to say it, because I love this series and I love Telltale, but this is one of the worst games I've ever played.
Clem is completely sidelined, and acts like a completely different, very heartless character. The new characters introduced this season are either boring, or not likable in the slightest, which includes the main character that you play as. The art style looks like shit. The OST is forgettable or just flat out bad (which is VERY disappointing, since I think Season 2 has some of the best OST I've heard in a videogame), and there are multiple bugs that I encountered throughout all my different playthroughs on different devices and versions that I've never experienced in any of the other seasons (mouse input delay, horrible frame rate for no reason, and having to do the most convoluted shit to get Ep. 3 to start without crashing).
The game is much shorter than the previous seasons, only being around 9 hours. This should probably be a positive, since it means you have to suffer for a shorter amount of time, but the game is so fucking boring/horrible that the game feels much, MUCH longer than 9 hours. After my first playthrough, I was surprised that the game was only 9 hours.
What's even worse is that the scrapped content and original plans for this game didn't look that bad at all. In fact, it looked fucking great.
Only around maybe 20 minutes of this game are actually important to the story (the length of the important parts of Clem's laughably short screentime). If these minutes worth of events weren't important, I would've recommended that you skip this season and go straight to The Final Season.
Do NOT let this game discourage you from playing The Final Season. The Final Season is beautiful, and, in my opinion, the best game of all time. Getting through this 9 hour slog is 100% worth it to get to The Final Season.
In a more positive light, I think this game just goes to show how good the other three seasons are. I think the other seasons are so good that they completely make up for this train wreck of a season, to the point where it doesn't really effect how I see the series as a whole. It still manages to be my favorite videogame series of all time.
3/10