Halloween: The Game Review - An Asymmetrical Multiplayer Nightmare?

Barely Magic Mike
10 minutes ago
8 min read

Genres spawned by indie breakout hits have an interesting circle of life. We see this all the time - Vampire Survivors spawned the survivors-like or “bullet heaven” genre, Among Us arguably popularized modern friendslop, Getting Over It started an age of ragebait platformers - and in all three cases, hundreds upon thousands of imitators of varying quality flooded the Steam store within months, eager for a slice of that same pie.

Asymmetrical multiplayer-focused horror games have a trickier story. While Dead by Daylight hardly birthed the genre, it's largely responsible for popularizing it, leading to a massive influx of similar titles that often use existing horror properties to draw players into their gore-soaked worlds. Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead, Predator, and even Killer Klowns from Outer Space have all had their turn at bat and have largely failed to capture an audience consistent enough to stay alive. This puts Halloween, as iconic a horror franchise as there's ever been, in a tricky spot where it's entering a genre in decline. Can the popularity of the franchise combine with a newfound added single-player campaign draw enough interest to capture players’ attention long-term?

Well… Halloween fans - I am one of you. Halloween is one of the few decades-old horror franchises that, in my opinion, aged well enough to scare people even today. One would think there could be tremendous potential to capture Michael Myers’ unique brand of terror in game form. But alas, this simply isn't it. I'll give you plenty of reasons why, but in my opinion, Halloween is as destined as any other to release to an enthusiastic audience that drops it like a rock within a week or two.

A single-player campaign is fairly new for a game like this and is arguably advertised as a way to hedge bets against the steady decline in interest that often leads exclusively multiplayer titles to their untimely grave. If that was the intention, then it has failed by nearly any conceivable metric of quality. The single-player portion of Halloween feels so pointless that I'm surprised it made it into the game at all. To say it functions only as a tutorial for how to play as Michael Myers for multiplayer mode would be to give it a tad too much credit, since its laughable attempts to game-ify established lore clash so hard with the sinister atmosphere it's trying to create that it practically becomes a parody of itself.

Fans might appreciate classic characters being shown

Myers’ very first kills involve hugging his victims to death until their spines break and their horrified ragdolls collapse to the ground. If there was a less cool fatality to open the game up with, I can't think of it. Maybe he could've shoved a giant colorful lollipop so far down their mouths that they suffocated on it? There's one I suppose. Please developers - don't take notes here. It doesn't help that these corny kill animations are also dreadfully long and quickly lose whatever novelty they might have had when you see them for the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth time. There's not much weapon variety to keep this repetition at bay, and sometimes picking up a new weapon will even reward you with a kill animation that has nothing to do with that weapon! See here, where I supposedly killed this guy with a broken pool cue and even got a specific achievement for doing so, but only ended up snapping his neck? Please - make it make sense.

This lack of kill variety is unfortunate in a game that casts you as a vicious killer, but is made more so by the fact that the rest of the campaign doesn't do much to compensate. You can tell the developers at Illfonic did a lot to give Michael Myers interesting abilities, but largely fails to integrate them in a way that makes sense or feels right in execution. You can slash at your victims with whatever weapon you're holding, but there's virtually no point in doing so when you can instead pick them up and perform a little minigame to decide which execution you want, killing them instantly. Even this girl doesn’t seem especially phased by the knife execution. Similarly, while the game puts focus on hiding bodies to make sure they're not discovered, I rarely saw the point in doing so aside from watching the hilarious animation where they're violently shoved into a closet or car or dumpster and just fall right through it into nothingness. The stalking mechanic, which makes a victim easier to hunt for every level it goes, is a weird one. On one hand, having to silently watch a prospective, unassuming victim through their window to build up the stalk meter is actually creepy in the way I'd hope a Halloween game would be. Filling it up to Level III will allow you to persistently see your victim's outline wherever they are too, which is a nice touch. On the other hand, in a bizarre extra gameification of that mechanic, you have these little circles that will pop up all over the victim and you'll have to aim at them to break them and make the stalk meter fill faster. When closely following a victim and having to stare all over their body to stalk them better, this mechanic goes from creepy to… well, still creepy, just with more perverted undertones.

Aside from these core abilities, you'll have others that run on cooldowns like the ability to see the outlines of where your victims are (or if they're inside, see which building they're in). You can also cut phone lines, turn off the power to a house, break through a door and other moves that feel appropriately villainy. But the final ability I'll mention feels like it pretty much breaks the game, and that's the ability to shape jump. The intentions here are good; you're a slasher movie villain and showing up out of nowhere to take out your victims should easily be part of your homicidal maniac repertoire. But the execution, which turns you into a ghost that can dash at the speed of a Star Wars pod racer across the map to hunt your victims or walk through open windows or doors, is goofy as all hell. I have no idea why there was a need to invent this weird “ghost mode” to help stalk your victims faster, rather than just zooming out to get a helicopter view of the map and picking a spot you can teleport to. In practice it's kind of fun to use, but struggles to fit the vibe.

As you might have picked up on by now, Halloween’s single player story is basically just the multiplayer… But worse. Worse because you can't play it with your friends, worse because it's broken up by some truly terrible dialogue and voice acting that tests the limits of campiness with every bizarrely-spoken line, and worse because it could give players the impression of having a genuine campaign when this is really just a way-too-long tutorial. So if you were hoping for a proper way to enhance the life of the game if the multiplayer dies out, look elsewhere. Because unless you're dying to raise your “Killer rating” in each mission by suffering through its tedious nonsense again, there is no reason to play through it again. There's not much reason to play through it once, either.

Multiplayer fares a little better, if only for the fact that playing with your friends in a game designed from the ground up to be played with your friends is naturally better than the alternative. The problem, or rather one of many problems, is that there's just so little content here worth caring about. You have 4 maps that all look basically the same, 1 game mode where Michael Myers has to just hunt down a bunch of civilians while they try to escape, some of which will be your friends and some of which will be pretty dumb bots, and a gameplay loop that pretty much consists of 1. Find your victims, 2. Stalk them for a little bit, usually the minimum amount to allow you to 3. Pick them up and stab or hug them to death. Rinse, repeat. Repeat. Repeat. REPEAT. Even the twists, like your victims calling the police, result in little more than having the cops show up and giving you some new easy-to-kill victims to dispose of.

And that's playing as Michael, clearly the only gameplay perspective that the developers even bothered to make fun. Playing as a civilian in multiplayer is absolutely dreadful, consisting of little more than searching all over the place for items that can help you save the others and escape, while hoping you're not being stalked. And I say hope because once Myers is on your trail, there's very little you can do to stop him. Sure you can run away, and fight back in limited and borderline pointless ways given that you can be taken out by being picked up and almost instantly killed, but the ability of our villain to see his victims AND travel to them so quickly AND stalk them endlessly without any real consequences other than those of a ticking clock makes playing as anybody else feel hopelessly tedious. You'll search for items, you'll maybe find something useful to briefly knock the killer out, you'll play a bunch of utterly dreadful mini-games including a conversation mini-game, for some reason? And if you're lucky, you'll find the right combination of things to escape before you're killed. Then if you're killed or escape, your reward and/or punishment is getting to play the terrible mini-games a bunch while spectating your friends. Did I mention the mini-games are terrible? Move the left stick left and right a bunch. Mash A. Play a weird Guitar Hero-esque thing that's clearly trying to compete with Agefield High for worst Guitar Hero-like mini-game ever. Then once you complete some, you may be able to unlock a pointless card that barely helps your friends. Oh, the killer's stalk meter will fill 10% slower now! There you go guys - you're as well as saved.

There's not much more to it than that. If you've played Illfonic’s previous title Killer Klowns from Outer Space, the game loop isn't too much different - it's mostly just the same thing but less balanced and somehow more boring. That's really what this boils down to - if Halloween: The Game should avoid being anything, it's boring. But never have I been more tempted to grab my phone and doomscroll than I was after being killed, having ten minutes left in the match and being confronted with the most abrasively pointless mini-games I've ever seen. It's not horrible or anything - it just feels like it has no reason to exist. Even five years ago it would've had no reason to exist. Now it just feels like an insult to whoever buys it based on the property alone.

And what a shame, because you can tell that there was effort put into this. The music does a great job of building the Halloween vibe, the locations look like they could come straight from the movies even though let's face it - most of them look basically the same. But everything else - the design, the gameplay, the voice acting, the balance, mini-games, variety, amount of content… It all screams “minimum viable product” to me. It feels like a game that was developed until it functioned, rather than until it was fun. I would be very cautious picking this one up, because the chances it retains a community past a week or two are, in my opinion, dreadfully low. And not the good kind of dread. Halloween: The Game gets the broken lamp.

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