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Halloween The Game is a messy recreation of Michael Myers' killing fantasy that was pushed out way too early, just to hit that October Halloween window.
I get it, games can't be in development forever, and at some point the devs really need to push it out; otherwise they risk increasing budgets and making it harder to find solid profits. Development and the feature set need to stop somewhere, and you need to release the game to your fans.
But there's never an excuse for releasing a Cyberpunk 2077, which is, by the way, now a fantastic game. The case with Halloween The Game isn't as broken as it was with CD Projekt Red's nightmarish release, but it's very problematic to the point where the game should have been delayed.
Halloween The Game is janky, runs terribly on a capable PC, looks blurry and fuzzy, and mechanically it's far from a smooth experience. It's nowhere near ready to be released as a premium AAA product carrying the name of such an iconic horror franchise.
There's little in Halloween The Game that I liked. Apart from the iconic soundtrack, the killer, and at times a genuinely atmospheric presentation, there's not much here for horror fans. In this state, Halloween The Game isn't worth your money. Perhaps it will be in a year or two, if Illfonic continue to fix the issues.
In case you're not familiar with this one, it's an asymmetrical horror game akin to Illfonic's other multiplayer titles like Friday the 13th: The Game and Predator: Hunting Grounds.
It puts one player in the boots of the murderer, and four as survivors who must do their best to avoid the killer and survive the round. The killer, of course, has to do the opposite: find and kill the victims in the most brutal and gruesome ways possible.
And gruesome is exactly what Halloween The Game is. You can stab victims with knives, cut them with axes, throw pitchforks at them - it's all in there. In that sense, Halloween manages to capture the brutality of Michael Myers' killing creativity. It's a shame that all of this feels janky, so unpolished that you'll never know if you can actually grab the victim. Sometimes I'd press the grab button two metres from the victim, and it would snap perfectly, and other times I'd be pressing it right beside the victim, and Michael would refuse to do it. It's such a frustrating experience that I think players playing as survivors trying to hide from Michael will have more fun than the killer.
If you plan on playing the short story mode, where Michael's origins are explained, you won't have the greatest experience there either. While the story is genuinely intriguing, the actual gameplay is far from it. NPCs would get stuck on random objects like chairs, tables, and beds. Sometimes they'd just stand in place even with you directly in front of them, refusing to run or react until you actually hit them. Their running patterns are ridiculous - sometimes they'll run straight back to the spot where you just attacked them. It's all hilarious, really.
The way Illfonic tried to balance Michael's invincibility and teleportation powers is with the addition of the police. Survivors can call the cops, who arrive to investigate, and while this is a great concept that could really bring more dynamic balance, it's incredibly unbalanced in practice.
You can literally facetank a whole police squad, and they won't even try to evade you or find cover. Instead, they'll attempt to facetank you back. Even bigger problem - Michael is so strong that he can literally start a war with the police force and kill them permanently, with no consequences for any of it.
There are real, game-breaking bugs present. Issues ranging from being unable to complete objectives to something as simple as getting stuck in animations have shown up repeatedly, and I played a fair share of this one with my buddies, who didn't have the greatest experience either.
Another issue I've found to be quite frustrating is an odd design choice: you get killed early in a match. Basically, you'll spend the entirety of the 10-15 minute match just spectating and playing a mini-game that can offer help in the form of cards to your mates out there fighting for their lives.
If you get bored of that, and I promise you, you will, and decide to leave, you get no experience. This is such a weird design decision by the developers that I couldn't wrap my mind about it at all. This can be a benefit but only to full parties of friends playing together, not solo-queue players.
And to mention one of the biggest issues the game has now: performance; it's seriously bad. I have a very high-end PC with an RTX 4080 and Ryzen 7800X3D, and the frame rate was far from acceptable, even when using optimised settings. I genuinely feel sorry for anyone running mid-range or lower-end hardware. The worst part is that the game doesn't even look good enough to justify running this poorly.
In a nutshell, Halloween The Game is so bad it's almost good - accidentally hilarious in ways Illfonic surely didn't intend.
Jokes aside, Illfonic have a mountain to climb. And I understand that games that launch this poorly can get fixed, but will it be too late for Halloween five, six, seven months down the line, when everyone forgets this game even existed? Perhaps, if this launched on Halloween 2027, it would have been a proper hit, but right now, it's doomed to fail.
I'd love it if I'm proven wrong and this somehow becomes a big thing over the spooky month of October, but there are simply too many things working against this game, and I fear that will prove to be too costly eventually.
The Good
Solid story mode- At times, it can get atmospheric
The Bad
Poor optimisation- Janky gameplay
- Fuzzy and blurry graphics
- Launched before it's ready
