Have you ever watched a Freddie or Jason movie and thought, “Man I wish I could be one of the helpless students being chased”, well your desires have bean heard as now there is a game that does that for you. Dead by Daylight can finally complete that dream of yours, but also the dream of chasing them as the monster in the forest.
Dead by daylight has a simple concept, you are either hunted or the hunter, you are Jason or Fredie clones, or a high school or college student, running for their life. This game is a 80’s horror simulator in the purest form, you are being chased by a unknown killer, and you have to desperately run away or be killed as you try and get help.
When playing as the killer, your job is to chase your victims around the level, trying to find them as they hide away and get away from you. You have a few moves for you to chase them, the biggest part is that you have no way to actually be killed, just like the 80’s horror films you are a threat that never goes away. Once you have managed to grab one of them, you can now go into the next part, the kills, around a level there are many traps that you can make use of, from hooks to spears you get to impale the victims on them, leaving there and moving onto capturing the next. The visceral deaths in the game really hit home the power you have as the killer, as the victims struggle desperately to not die really gives you a sense of power you have over them. Apart from killing them you only have really one other goal and that is to stop the generators around each level from being activated, the noise and lights that appear when a player is trying to turn one on is a massive give away to tell you where someone is.
If you get to play as the victims however you get a different type of game, now you have to run and hide, trying to turn those generators on to finish a level and survive. Survivors get the advantages that they are smaller and can fit into gaps and access ways that the killer can not access, you need to make use of these if you are being chased to get away once you have been seen. However you get the terrifying sound design to help you, when the killer is close but you are struggling to see him, you can hear a heartbeat slowly getting louder and faster the closer the killer is to your hiding spot, a truly terrifying thing to listen to as you hope he goes away after not seeing you.
There are some obvious problems with this game set up though, and something those who played Verses in Left 4 dead will know about, people do not want to play the victims, this game lets you choose what you want to play, and the vast amount of players are queueing up as the killer, which means massive wait times for people who want to play, even for those who are survivors can wait up to 5mins to get into game, and that is if it actually works, as a lot of times it just doesn’t, as if you have a player in your lobby who AFK’s? Well your only choice is to leave and find another again.
Graphically the game hits everything on the head, the game is dripping with atmosphere and honestly without the knowledge of an unkillable enemy would start to creep you out regardless. It places you in a dark environment, with minimal view distance, obscured by fog, the game purposely makes it difficult for you to see, and makes it difficult to tell where the killer is at any one time. The game feels like its been ripped directly out of a 80’s horror flick, in both visual and sound direction, it is a game that makes you feel like one of the little girls from a Jason movie.
Overall the game is limited by its poor netcode which frequently causes problems when playing in games. The game idea is fantastic and when it works, the game hands down is one of the best coop horror experiences I have played. However, with it being few and far between good and bad games it makes it a disappointing experience more often than not. If the game gets patched I can see this being a fantastic co-op experience, but if it doesn’t, and seeing how its being treated on PC currently, that may be a real concern, it may never reach the full potential that is available, 5/10 until patched.
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