Outbreak: The Nightmare Chronicles

My next game saw me return to the shorter format and the joy of no missable achievements. That’s the only real redeeming quality of Outbreak: The Nightmare Chronicles though.

This is another game that doesn’t require you to complete it to get all the achievements but after playing for ten minutes, this became more relief rather than disappointment. The game is hard and not because the game itself is difficult. It’s just massively unfair. You start the game with a hand gun and a knife and a small number of bullets, but each zombie takes anywhere from 8 to 14 bullets to put down. There are ‘critical hits’ which do extra damage, but these occur based on RNG so can’t be relied upon to get you out of a pickle.

The character you control also moves ridiculously slowly and saunters about in a very relaxed manner considering they are alone in a house filled with the undead. At first this was funny but after thirty minutes of struggling to move anywhere it becomes horrendously frustrating.

In terms of comparability, it looks and feels like a cheap Resident Evil knock off. The camera is third person and changes perspective as you move through rooms and the directional controls change when the camera does. While I get this, there had to be a better way of implementing it – most of the time when I attempted to change my direction to match the camera, I ended up going back on myself and causing the camera to continually shift.

Looks wise, it’s ugly, dreary, unimaginative and lots of other mean words on the same spectrum. There was a funny bit though when I clicked on one of the paintings in a hallway. This painting had appeared five or six times at this point and I just thought it was lazy game design. However, when I clicked on the painting, it produced the following dialogue: ‘Did they buy these in bulk or something?’ so there was an awareness to the cheap design. This would have been hilarious if the game controls were any good. It did provide me with a light chuckle though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

As mentioned above, there isn’t a need to complete the game to get all the achievements. The list is essentially a small grind and the last achievement I unlocked was for killing 200 ‘threats.’ Along with killing things, you also need to luck out and get 50 critical hits, heal yourself 10 times and lastly and probably most annoying, solving 50 puzzles.

Solving puzzles means opening doors that need keys or codes. This means replaying the opening 5 minutes of the game over and over again getting 4 ‘puzzles’ per run and is easily the most grindy-feeling achievement. For the kills and critical hits, you are actually doing something, so it doesn’t feel grindy. I did try to progress further in the game on my several runs through this opening segment, but I couldn’t find the key I needed to progress despite the fact there were only five or so rooms I could go in. Even Google didn’t help me.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Outbreak: The Nightmare Chronicles is a quick but boring completion where all the achievements can be earned in under 3 hours. It’s also not a good game that feels under developed. There are another 2 games in the series, which I bought as a collection, but they are a lot further down the to do list and won’t be moving up any time soon.