To preface, I feel a bit bad writing this review. I like articulating my thoughts on games but at the end of the day I played this with some friends (who, thank goodness, don't know about this account) and am subsequently compelled to talk shit about it, maybe as a warning to other prospective players, maybe just for talking's sake. Anyways!
I didn't really know anything about this game going in, but I downloaded it for free on April Fool's, an April Fool's which kind of passed me by in comparison to others. After that day - which I didn't know until the time of writing but was the release day of the game overall - the price was hiked up to 10 dollars. Even trying to apply Hanlon's razor I can't really see this as much besides a cynical carpet-pull, a spur-of-the-moment reaction to the unprecedented success of their April Fool's game; whether it was to fund the game servers or simply to make a killing I couldnt say, but the impression persists.
I hate to be surely the billionth person to make this comparison - no less to a game I haven't played - but this follows in Lethal Company's stride as a co-op horror game with proximity voice chat, about exploring grim environments, finding artifacts and surviving encounters with monsters. The main difference is the addition of an in-game camera, the motivation behind your escapades being to gain views in the game's universe, funding future exploits. This feature allows you to save the videos you record in the game to your computer which I really appreciate; any kind of game that generates media like this (drawings in skribbl.io or Gartic Phone, replays in Super Smash Bros., etc.) gets at least a few points for me.
Sadly my praise for the game ends there.
When the emphasis is so heavily put on the players to "be funny" for an invisible audience all the sense of exploration in the game pretty much immediately feel dry and manufactured, the slippery controls and emphasis on physical darkness further pushing this absolutely stilted horror aspect where (seemingly) random audio cues and random things coming at you from the darkness and killing you comprises the horror aspect of this game.
I'm not huge on the monsters themselves either; they come from the DOORS on Roblox camp of monsters that come at you from nowhere, that you stand no chance against until you find out their "quirk", usually from a scholarly friend as opposed to any in-game learning experience. Most monsters, after they've had their fun with you, either kill you outright or separate you from the group, severing you from the camera and thus the object of the game.
The camera being a physical object in the game world is a fun idea, the real camera shake and angles that this allows in replays is honestly nice, but at the same time I feel like it puts an unfair emphasis on one player as the anchor of the group, everyone else orbiting around them and hoping they aren't separated. Because once you are separated, there's pretty much nothing to do except try and retrace your steps, or sit around in the post-game chat doing literally nothing. Maybe something like randomly switching who owns the camera - perhaps upon detecting a splinter in the group - but where it stands it makes half the game for half the players, at least in my eyes, dreadfully boring.
All in all this, for me, was a free game. I'm glad I played it for the short time I did, but 5 in-game rounds was enough for me to grow tired of the game; which I suppose is OK for a free novelty game, but for a commercial product is another prospect entirely.
I didn't really know anything about this game going in, but I downloaded it for free on April Fool's, an April Fool's which kind of passed me by in comparison to others. After that day - which I didn't know until the time of writing but was the release day of the game overall - the price was hiked up to 10 dollars. Even trying to apply Hanlon's razor I can't really see this as much besides a cynical carpet-pull, a spur-of-the-moment reaction to the unprecedented success of their April Fool's game; whether it was to fund the game servers or simply to make a killing I couldnt say, but the impression persists.
I hate to be surely the billionth person to make this comparison - no less to a game I haven't played - but this follows in Lethal Company's stride as a co-op horror game with proximity voice chat, about exploring grim environments, finding artifacts and surviving encounters with monsters. The main difference is the addition of an in-game camera, the motivation behind your escapades being to gain views in the game's universe, funding future exploits. This feature allows you to save the videos you record in the game to your computer which I really appreciate; any kind of game that generates media like this (drawings in skribbl.io or Gartic Phone, replays in Super Smash Bros., etc.) gets at least a few points for me.
Sadly my praise for the game ends there.
When the emphasis is so heavily put on the players to "be funny" for an invisible audience all the sense of exploration in the game pretty much immediately feel dry and manufactured, the slippery controls and emphasis on physical darkness further pushing this absolutely stilted horror aspect where (seemingly) random audio cues and random things coming at you from the darkness and killing you comprises the horror aspect of this game.
I'm not huge on the monsters themselves either; they come from the DOORS on Roblox camp of monsters that come at you from nowhere, that you stand no chance against until you find out their "quirk", usually from a scholarly friend as opposed to any in-game learning experience. Most monsters, after they've had their fun with you, either kill you outright or separate you from the group, severing you from the camera and thus the object of the game.
The camera being a physical object in the game world is a fun idea, the real camera shake and angles that this allows in replays is honestly nice, but at the same time I feel like it puts an unfair emphasis on one player as the anchor of the group, everyone else orbiting around them and hoping they aren't separated. Because once you are separated, there's pretty much nothing to do except try and retrace your steps, or sit around in the post-game chat doing literally nothing. Maybe something like randomly switching who owns the camera - perhaps upon detecting a splinter in the group - but where it stands it makes half the game for half the players, at least in my eyes, dreadfully boring.
All in all this, for me, was a free game. I'm glad I played it for the short time I did, but 5 in-game rounds was enough for me to grow tired of the game; which I suppose is OK for a free novelty game, but for a commercial product is another prospect entirely.
3 Comments
i feel like part of me knew that, or at least i could figure it out. landfall, creators of totally accurate battle sim and clustertruck are probably not in dire straits lol. thank you for reading!
Watch your tone wtf!!!!!!!!
inbox
27 days ago
everything else is way too true and as someone who played and shortly refunded lethal company your comparison is spot on, and somehow most of the criticism here also applies to that despite all the mechanical differences