Dead By Daylight Xbox One Review
Do you enjoy feeling completely and utterly distressed, constantly looking over your shoulders, unsure of where danger could come from at any given moment? You do? Great, you should probably give Dead By Daylight a shot. Do you enjoy integrating your sick and sadistic maniacal methods into fucking with other people’s heads, causing irrational stress and fear to others for your own personal gains, and virtually slaughtering some poor helpless folks to some demonic force with meat hooks? You do? That’s a little fucked, but you should still spend some time with Dead By Daylight. Starbreeze Studios and Behaviour Interactive decided to take asymmetrical survival horror to another level with Dead BY daylight and although the game is not perfect, it is still a great time, especially after a few beers and with a group of other horror enthusiasts. This is of course, if you plan on playing as the survivor trying to escape, if you want to go on a rampage playing as the killer you could just put on your Baphomet sweatshirt, shut all the lights off, light every candle in the room and sit in the middle of your very own pentagram to play alone.
I should just go ahead and apologize for this review taking so long. I wanted to spend a few weeks getting hours in on the killers and survivors, and after the first two weeks following the Xbox One game launch I got caught up with finishing my last month and a half of grad school. Anyway, Dead By Daylight is an asymmetrical survival horror game with 4 survivors trying to escape the clutches of a killer who is apparently sacrificing these people to some higher demonic power (I didn’t dig too much through the lore). There are currently 10 survivors, all with some varying perks that can be taken to benefit yourself and your team when in game, however, none of the passive abilities really make anyone character better than another when it comes to survival. There are currently 8 killers, with the most recent, The Huntress, being released just 2 days ago (soon to be released for console). There is quite some variance between the killers for sure. It is pretty much up to you how you want to go about slaughtering these individuals, if you want to channel your inner Leatherface, play the Hillbilly and tear people to shreds with a chainsaw and meat tenderizer. If you work at a hospital and just keep getting the shit end of the stick, maybe take a shot at playing the Nurse or the Doctor and get some payback…not that I’ve done this before. Regardless, each killer has a distinct feel to them and it’s just about testing them all out and finding your glass slipper, that’s covered in blood, that fits just right.
Dead By Daylight does exactly what it was made to do, either make you feel completely uncomfortable and uneasy, scare the shit out of you, and give you a real challenge to survive. Or, allows you to play out some of your inner demons by slaughtering “survivors” in some very unique and interesting ways. The graphics are fine, but the real visual takeaway form this game is the character design. Each survivor looks and acts unique, and the killer designs are amazing. Probably some of the best monster/killer designs I’ve seen in a videogame in a very long time. Every one of the killers looks menacing and nightmare inducing and they all play so differently that playing as a killer tends not to get old fast. The one drawback I found with the game was the repetitive nature when it came to playing as the survivors. It is basically, run around, acquire any loot you can while avoiding the killer as best as you can and in my opinion the most monotonous part of the game, the generator repairs. Repairing generators is the only real downside to this game, you just hold down the bumpers and have to hit a QTE at the perfect time in order to make progress with it. One way to make this better is with varying up the way to repair these generators. Another issue I have is that if you are the last survivor, it is incredibly difficult to repair generators whilst being hunted down making the difficulty curve in game heavily in the killers favor, which makes sense if they performed well enough to kill 3 survivors already. This usually leads to the killers camping a hooked enemy until they die so the other survivors can;t get to them. One way to combat this is by increasing ramping up the repair speed every time a survivor dies, or heavily increasing your repair speeds when another survivor is hooked so the killer is forced to decide between camping the hooked survivor and allowing another 2 generators to be turned on, or actively go try to stop the remaining survivors. That might be the most simple way to thwart the whole hooked survivor camping issue.
All in all, I really enjoy putting in some time with Dead By Daylight, in all honesty, it is my palette cleanser after bad stints in OverWatch. The gameplay is varied enough to warrant continual online play, the price is ideal at 30$, and the content is well worth the investment seeing as though they release new maps, survivors, and killers left and right. They also have some amazing cameo characters like Bill from Left 4 Dead and Michael Meyers from Halloween. The Huntress was just added to the PC version of the game 3 days ago and should be hitting the console market soon enough.
Dead By Daylight
4 Serial Killers Hiding Behind a TV Screen out of 5
