Few things are as fun as a zombie apocalypse. Going out for supplies, getting your gun, firing a couple of rounds, alerting a horde, and barely making it back alive just to find out someone got bit is all good fun. Or is it just me?
The Walking Dead: All-Stars is a idle hero collector game, similar to other hero gachas like League of Pantheons or Magnum Quest. In this game, you’ll assemble characters from all walks of The Walking Dead universe, leveraging their unique strengths and skills to create an unstoppable fighting force. The Walking Dead: All-Stars is available on both the App Store and the Google Play Store.
The Walking Dead: All-Stars combines just enough depth with streamlined features to make it a game that’s easy to learn and fun to pick up and play. If, however, you’d like a leg up on what the game offers, as well as a sneak peek of the early game, read on as we have put together a beginner’s guide for The Walking Dead: All-Stars!
It’s All About The People
It wouldn’t be “all-stars” without a wide cast of characters now, would it? The core of the game is its many, many characters, some of whom will be familiar to fans of the TV series, and more of whom will be familiar to readers of the comic books.
Character Stats
All characters have stats. On the Survivors page, you can see their three main stats: HP, ATK, and DEF. But if you’d like a more detailed view, you can tap the info (i) button on the right side of the screen to bring up this panel.
But for your reference, here’s a list of character stats and what they do.
- HP: Hit points. If these hit zero, the character dies and can no longer participate in the current battle.
- ATK: Attack power. The more of this you have, the stronger your attacks are.
- DEF: Defense. Makes it harder to get the crap beaten out of you.
- Crit Rate: The chance that an attack will do double damage.
- ACC: Accuracy. Makes your Physical attacks hit more.
- EVA: Evasion. Makes you harder to hit with Physical attacks.
- SPD: Speed. Affects both a character’s movement speed and their skill cooldowns.
- HPS: HP regeneration per second. Always active.
- FP Reduction Rate: Damage reduction from FP attacks, represented as a percentage.
- PHYS Reduction Rate: Damage reduction from Physical attacks, represented as a percentage.
- Lifesteal: Affects how much HP you recover after dealing damage.
Character Skills
Each character also brings their own unique skills to bear against their foes.
All characters have a powerful Ultimate Skill that they can use at any time if their energy gauge (the yellow bar below their health) is full. All characters start with their Ultimate unlocked by default.
Each character also has a number of other skills that they use, which is dependent on their rarity. Rare characters have 2 extra skills, Epic characters have 3 more, and so on. These skills are used automatically in combat – and no, you have no control over when and on what they use these skills – but can still make a sizeable difference.
Character skills automatically level up as the hero gains levels, but a level that would cause a character to gain skill levels comes with an added cost of needing Skill Manuals.
Character Roles
There are 5 character roles in The Walking Dead: All-Stars. Each role gives you a general idea of what a character’s purpose in battle is.
Warriors are powerful melee fighters. These characters like to get stuck in bloody and brutal close-quarters combat, and specialize at both taking punishment and dishing it out.
Tanks focus on protecting their allies, whether that’s through taunts, shields, or anything else. While their damage output is mediocre at best, tanks are always the first in a fight and the last one standing.
Technicians use their plethora of ranged weaponry – guns, grenades, you name it – from the backlines. These fighters aren’t very durable, but they can deal a lot of damage.
Rangers use a variety of weapons, both melee and ranged, to take out key targets in a fight and make things easier for both themselves and their allies.
Support units rarely take the spotlight, instead using their abilities to bolster their comrades through healing and buffs.
Character Alignments and Formation Bonuses
Alignments serve as an elemental system in The Walking Dead: All-Stars.
As with most games with an elemental weakness and resistance system, The Walking Dead: All-Stars uses the 4 – 2 elemental design. That is to say, Ally is good against Bystander, Bystander is good against Neutral, Neutral is good against Predator, and Predator is good against Ally. And then we have the two outlying elements/alignments, Overseer and Warlord, which are strong against each other.
Alignments form not only the crux of The Walking Dead: All-Stars’ elemental system, but also its formation bonuses.
Depending on the alignment of the units in your formation, you can activate various bonuses.
- 3 characters of the same alignment give every +10% HP and ATK.
- 3 characters of the same alignment plus 2 of another (same) alignment increases this boost to +15% HP and ATK.
- 4 characters of the same alignment give everyone +15% ATK and +20% HP.
- 5 characters of the same alignment give everyone +25% HP and ATK.
These formation bonuses can be juicy, but they’re not always the smartest move. +25% HP and ATK is a respectable amount, but bringing 5 characters of the same alignment pretty much guarantees you die against a team that packs even a few characters that your alignment is weak against.
Overseers and Warlords have their own unique formation bonuses.
- Overseers are a wild card, and are treated as if they belonged to every faction for the purposes of computing bonuses, except Warlords.
Warlords have their own bonus table, depending on the amount of Warlords there are in the formation. These bonuses apply to everyone, not just Warlords.
- DEF + 30%
- When hit, energy recovery +25%
- Crit rate +15%
- Crit rate +30%
- SPD +15
Actual Combat
After detailing stats, skills, and alignments, it’s time to talk about combat. Combat in The Walking Dead: All-Stars is relatively simple.
After arranging five units in a 2-3 formation, they’ll move forward, attacking enemies they run across. Units can and will run to engage new targets if they have to, for example, if they kill the enemy they’re fighting. And any time their energy gauge is full, they’ll use their ultimate ability. That’s about it!
Note that you can activate Auto mode to have your characters use their ultimates any time they’re off cooldown by tapping the Auto button to the left. Once you clear 2-16, you can also tap the 2x button to play out battles at double speed.
Character Recruitment
Getting new characters in The Walking Dead: All-Stars is fairly simple. Just roll in the gacha!
Rolling in the basic banner uses up Gold Bars. It costs 400 per roll, but I highly recommend doing the 10 roll instead as it has a 10% discount (bringing the cost down to 3600) and has a guaranteed Epic character.
There are also Alignment-based banners. These character banners are guaranteed to give you characters of that faction. This comes at the cost of requiring you to purchase tickets (with real money) at the store.
Other ways to recruit characters involve collecting Notebook Pieces from your adventures, which give you a random character depending on the notebook’s rarity, as well as from events and by completing the story.
The Wish List
The Wish List is a very important feature that you should absolutely use before rolling in the gacha.
In the wish list, you can select up to 5 characters per faction – Ally, Bystander, Neutral, and Predator. When you get an Epic character from a pull, there’s a much higher chance that that character will be one on your wishlist. Note that you can also deliberately leave wish list slots blank if you want to get only specific characters.
Build A Town
Your survivors need a place to regroup, rest, and resupply. That’s where The Walking Dead: All-Stars’ town function comes in.
Unlocking Town Buildings
Initially, you won’t be able to construct anything. That’s because building blueprints are gated behind campaign stages. It’s in your best interest to rush through regular stages as quickly as possible to unlock new buildings.
As you progress through the campaign, you’ll not only gain new building blueprints, but also gain the ability to upgrade your existing buildings to improve their performance. Make sure to check your town from time to time to see if anything can be renovated!
Character Recruitment
As mentioned earlier in this guide, you’ll get characters mostly through the gachapon, and it’s in the town that you do that.
Before you can roll for characters, you’ll need to make some headway in the main game – if memory serves, around the end of the first chapter is where you can set this up. If you haven’t done so, make sure your wish list has been setup just right so you’ve got a higher chance of drawing characters you actually want.
The Command Center
The Command Center is where you can fuse characters of the same rarity into one of a higher rarity, improving their stats and skills in the process.
As there’s no point to having multiple copies of a character, always drop by the Command Center after rolling in the gacha to strengthen the characters you currently have and bolster your overall strength.
Administration
The Administration office is where you can put related characters together to give them a passive boost.
Some characters can bond with other to form unique stories, which you can read in the administration office. If you also own these characters, you can also put them into the slots on the left side. Once those slots are completely filled, every one of those characters gets a buff!
Note that the buff’s strength is determined by the overall rarity of the characters involved in the story. To activate more potent buffs, you’ll need to raise all of their rarities to unlock new tiers of perks, as can be seen on the right side.
The Trading Post
The Trading Post is where you can spend the multiple currencies you’ve been gathering for more immediately useful goods.
You can spend Gold Bars, and if you’re lucky, canned food to buy equipment and supplies in the trading post. More importantly, this is where you can spend the currency you earn from both transfering survivors and from Supply Runs.
The Gate
Your town gate is where you can manage your survivors, and whether to disarm or transfer them.
Nothing is ever truly lost. Mostly. If you ever decide that you no longer want to use a character, or found a character with a higher rarity and better performance that fulfills the same niche, you can elect to Disarm a character.
Disarming a character means reducing them to level 1 and gaining back the resources you spent developing them. This isn’t free – you’ll need to pay 20 Gold Bars to Disarm a character.
The gate also features the option to Transfer Survivors, which is a euphemism for selling or scrapping them.
Only characters of Normal rarity can be Transferred, and if you do so, you’ll gain a handful of resources that you can use to develop your rarer, better characters. Transferred characters also give you special currency that can be spent at your Trading Post.
The Post-Apocalyptic Economy
People still need to eat and be paid even after the end of the world. To build up your town and your fighting force, you’ll need to secure stable income through various means.
Do Your Dailies
This should go without saying for every mobile game, but do your dailies. Your daily quests are your daily bread, and while they won’t give you anything flashy, they’ll give you the resources you need to advance.
The Walking Dead: All-Stars’ quests are divided into daily quests, weekly quests, and main quests. Dailies and weeklies are self-explanatory, and both will fill up their own activity bar which you can redeem for even more rewards. Main Quests are one-off tasks that serve as milestones as you play, and give out generous rewards when you complete them.
Participate in Events
You should always make a point of participating in events whenever they’re available. Events almost always give out basic resources and maybe even one-time limited rewards, if you’re lucky!
Be sure to check the events menu on the main screen whenever there’s a red dot on it – that means that either a new event has started or that you have prizes waiting to be redeemed. New players, in particular, should take advantage of the New User Login Event, as well as the Leader Rick Event to gain new, useful characters early in the game.
Go on Supply Runs
Supply Runs are a great way to both test your combat prowess and earn a chunk of resources to boot.
Supply Runs are a sort of roguelike game mode. During a Supply Run, you start at the bottommost left hex, and have to select an adjacent hex to move to. These hexes can hold many things, from combat encounters, to temporary characters that you can use for the duration of the supply run, to health, and even just resources. The end goal for a Supply Run isn’t just to nab resources, but also grab valuable Supply Run currency that you can trade in for items like notebooks at the Trading Post!
Each battle brings you more opportunities during Supply Runs, and you can select a stat bonus that applies for the rest of the run after clearing each fight. You’ll need to carefully balance your moves between gaining resources or going for bonuses to reach higher levels.
Auto-Search and Quick Search
Even while you’re AFK, the game will constantly generate resources for you to use when you get back. This is known as the Auto-Search function. To open this menu and claim your rewards, just tap on the background in the main menu. The more items there are for you to collect, the more cluttered the scene will be.
Your Auto-Search income has two limitations. First: the resource generation rate is dependent on how far you’ve gone in the main story, with certain stages unlocking specific drops – and you can see how much of each resource you generate per hour in the Auto-Search panel. Second: Auto-Search resources cap at 12 hours’ worth of gathering. To maximize your Auto-Search income, be sure to drop in before your resources hit the cap to ensure that nothing is wasted.
If you need a quick burst of resources, you can have your people go on a Quick Search by tapping the button in the upper right of the menu. This allows you to get 2 hours’ worth of resources that you would have gotten via Auto-Search. As expected, there’s a limit to this: you can only do it twice a day, it’s got a (give or take) 24 hour cooldown.
You also only get one free use of Quick Search per day – any Quick Searches past the first one will start costing Gold Bars.If you’re sitting down to play for a bit, it’s a good idea to use Quick Search at the end of your play session – that way, you’ll probably have progressed further, meaning your Auto-Search (and therefore Quick Search) will yield better stuff.
Character Stories
Each non-generic character you have has a story to tell, and by sharing some of your time (even a few milliseconds, if you want), you can earn an extra couple of Gold Bars from each of them.
To read a character’s story, go to that character on the Survivors screen, then tap Story.
7-Day Login Event
New players are also automatically placed in the 7 Day Login Event.
All you need to do is log in every day to claim valuable resources and rewards, such as Gold Bars, Survivor Exp, and recruitment tickets. If you complete all 7 days, you’ll also gain an invaluable Survivor Choice Ticket that lets you pick one out of five Epic characters!
Live To See Another Day
Armed now with this knowledge, only you can determine how you’ll survive going forward. Will you band together with other idealists, believing in humanity’s ability to overcome its baser instincts? Or will you fall back to a might-makes-right society? The decision lies solely in your hands.
That ends my The Walking Dead: All-Stars beginner’s guide, and I hope you were able to pick something up from it. If I missed anything, or if you have anything add, make yourself heard in the comments!