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.

Deadly Premonition

Story – 9/10

In terms of storyline, Deadly Premonition is one of the best I’ve ever seen in video games but not for the usual reasons. The storyline focuses on the main protagonist, York, who is an unorthodox FBI agent investigating a serial killer in a small town. 

A big highlight for me is that the game refuses to take itself seriously where the characters act accordingly based on your gameplay decisions. For example there are various points where you have to travel with other characters but you can also choose not to. Not doing so can cause some hilarious dialogue mainly aimed at York being an unaware lunatic - something that York continually disregards.

I really like that the gameplay interlinks with the story but the main highlight is comic value portrayed throughout, even during moments of seriousness.

Picture – 4/10

The visual quality of the game is very poor for Xbox360 standard. It’s very blocky and even during cut scenes, the characters appear rigid and if they are being forced to act. They also make strange gestures during conversations which leads me down the poor development path as opposed to being done on purpose for comedy.

Sound – 7/10

Going in line with the comedy elements described under the story, the accompanying music adds to the comic element. Some reviews have criticised this approach but I think it is genius, especially when playing light-hearted Jazz music during tense situations.

Gameplay – 2/10

This is where the game falls on its comic-horror ass. ‘Glitchy as fuck’ is a generous description of the gameplay which is a shame as all the good points above are undone by the game failing to do what it is created to do – be PLAYABLE.

On two occasions I have found myself completely stuck because the game has glitched and prevented me from progressing. One of these times was towards the end of a long and arduous section where one of the zombies wouldn’t load and it wouldn’t let me continue until I had killed every zombie in the room. I lost roughly half an hour of my life for no reason due to poor development.

Other situations involve the game not allowing me to progress even though I’ve done the required prerequisite activity. Sometimes the cut scenes won’t load and other times the game freezes completely.

However the one that nearly resulted in the death of my controller was when I was replaying a chapter to finish the trading card collection. It is important to note that you cannot save the game during a chapter replay I had collected about 5 cards which has taken about an hour. I went to the location of the next card and fell through a hole in the graphics, dying and losing all my progress. This is just unacceptable in terms of developer short cuts.

These are my massive gameplay issues. However, I also found the areas of driving and shooting to be sadly lacking, which is shit when you take into account that driving and shooting take up about 90% of the active gameplay.

The driving controls are awful. If you go down a hill, without any modifications to your car, as soon as your vehicle reaches 60mph, you can no longer control it and it veers off to the side of the road and smashes into the invisible barrier, if you happen to be driving next to a grassy embankment.

The combat aspects of the game are just as bad, if not worse. I lost count of the amount of times I’ve shot armed zombies (what is that about?!) with a shotgun from point blank range for them to then shoot me as if i did nothing. And then York falls on the floor holding his face in loads of pain... hmm. Really? Also it is unreasonable, on any level of difficulty, for a zombie to take 16+ headshots AND STILL NOT DIE. Why not just make it harder to shoot the zombies in the head? That would have at least made the combat scenarios more bearable.

That doesn’t leave much else of the game that isn’t poorly developed except for what I’ve already mentioned, making my score of 2 actually quite generous.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 12 Achievements

I’m all for secret achievements under one premise – that they are story linked and are unmissable. Deadly Premonition fails to meet these criteria in that there are achievements for completing the game on each difficulty level and another for completing an in game collection and they are all listed as secret.

Failure number two on the achievement front is having non stackable achievements. To earn 1,000 point you have to play through on all three difficulties. This is really irritating especially when it is mainly a story driven game and there is not that much difference in the challenge level between difficulties. This makes for the most frustrating aspect of these achievements in having to replay a story driven game three times to earn the 1,000 points.

Downloadable Content – Not Applicable

Summary

Deadly Premonition is definitely worth playing from a story point of view, but if you fancy a 100% game I would avoid it. Having to play a game three times when it is exactly the same in each of these occasions is a definite miss for me.