Rating: 3.5/5
Dead by Daylight:
Dead by Daylight(or DBD for short) is a great game on paper. The asymmetrical nature of the game, being the survivors or the killers, gives the players options into the way they want to play: either escape together with friends or play as a lone wolf murderer who relies on nobody but himself…Did I also mention that this game has a cool roster of playable characters from the game’s original stories and slasher horror classics such as Friday the 13th and Halloween? In this game, it is totally possible to see the Xenomorph(from Alien) hunting down Alucard(from Castlevania) while Leon Kennedy, (from Resident Evil) is healing Bill Overback(from Left 4 Dead) as Ash Williams(from Evil Dead) is dying on the ground. It is a never ending party for any horror lover. The game follows a basic but replayable gameplay loop, where, in each game, 4 survivors and 1 killer spawns on a random map inspired by the stories of the game, and the survivor’s goal is to complete 5 generators on the map and open the exit gates to escape, and the killer needs to stop them by attacking them and sacrificing them on hooks placed around the map. The split faction nature of this game easily creates a thrilling environment for the survivors to experience what it feels like to be in a horror movie, and for the killer players, you can finally feel like a true invincible force of nature that wreaks havoc on everything in your path.
That said, there are equally as many issues if not more about this game that is so great in an ideal world. It might surprise you to hear that cheating in this game is the least of issues because I believe it is the extreme negative outlook within the DBD community that earned it such a rating. To start off, there are many unspoken rules about this game that a new player may not understand, and though I appreciate the developer’s recent efforts into trying to highlight these rules to newbies, they’ve only done a half decent job on a crumble of ice that makes up the notoriety that this game receives online. For instance, many strategies that may be instinctual to a new killer player such as camping(the strategy which to secure a kill, a killer “camps” next to the hook to make sure nobody can safely save the person on hook) or tunneling(the strategy which a killer keep on chasing one specific survivor in order to make sure they are eliminated) are strongly condemned within the community, and if you unwittingly did these things because you wanted to win, the post-game chats will give you a rude awakening. Sure, all of this is in the name of protecting that game from its “fun” aspects, and to assure that, these rules had to be made. Another example of the discord within the community is in regards to the game’s balancing; ever so often, perks(passive ability combinations for both sides) could be extremely broken or massive bugs would appear for either side to exploit, and people would be quick to exploit them for their own share of “fun’, that is, built on top of other’s misery, and because the developers don’t care about their game, it won’t be patched until another month. In short, Dead by Daylight is a wild west for its players as the developers does a half-decent job trying to maintain order, and as a result it is up to the players to create their own rules of the game, but it is the unofficial nature of it combined with the misery of the general player base that makes Dead by Daylight dead to me.