Dead by Daylight – Curtain Call Chapter
Behavior Digital/Starbreeze Publishing
Dead by Daylight has been out for just over two years now. I still remember its rather rickety launch—there were so many bugs and glitches that needed to be ironed out that it didn’t look good. But the real turn off for most gamers was the game’s super-dodgy multiplayer logistics. It was almost impossible to team up with your friends. In fact, most of the time you’d just end up with a bunch of randoms (most of who didn’t have mics or didn’t want to use them).
Since then, Behavior Digital has spent a lot of time and money plugging away at the various issues that Dead by Daylight had. Today, not only are the multiplayer problems worked out (for the most part) but they’ve also done their best to address the game’s balance issues.
Dead by Daylight is a multiplayer only, asymmetric game where four people play as survivors and a fifth plays as the apex killer. The backstory has something to do with a powerful demonic entity which has assembled a number of notorious killers in order to manipulate them into killing a bunch of innocent survivors (as if you’d need to coerce them.)
The survivors have been mysteriously teleported to the entity’s dimension and are forced to try to find a number of generators on each dreary map. If the survivors manage to repair all of the generators then they’ll be able to unlock that map’s exits and have a chance to escape. However, if the killer captures the survivors and hangs them on giant meat hooks scattered around on each map, they’ll usually meet their end. The survivors have a chance at unhooking fellow survivors but risk their lives in the process.
It’s a pretty interesting setup as far as game premises go. Personally, I’ve always thought that it was bizarre that killers aren’t able to simply kill survivors outright instead of having to hang drag them to hooks, chuck them onto said hooks, and then wait as a timer counts down to their prey’s death.
Anyhoo, Behavior recently celebrated the two year anniversary of Dead by Daylight by introducing a killer clown to their roster of evil baddies. Make way Freddy Krueger and Michael Meyers, The Clown is here. The DLC’s description is actually one of the catchiest I’ve read in quite a while:
“The CURTAIN CALL Chapter is a Chapter for Dead by Daylight. People often speak of the tears of a clown, of the sadness that lies beneath the greasepaint smile. What if that wasn’t sadness, but a deep malevolence, born of a life spent in the pursuit of drink and gluttony? A mind that sees others only as vessels for torture, and reduces their bodies down to a single finger, a trophy to be added to a collection? For something like that to survive, it would have to wear a disguise, cloak itself in a brighter aspect and a broad smile, even if it were just painted on. Kate Denson’s smile is genuine, friendly and warm. She sings of love and life, family and hope. She holds those values dear, and will fight anyone who tries to destroy them.”
So what’s this all mean in terms of gameplay? Well, The Clown comes equipped with poisonous home-brewed bottles of Afterpiece Tonic. This lethargy-causing liquid can debilitate any survivors that it is splashed on and makes them temporarily slow moving. This can be especially scary when you’re trying to outrun The Clown and he tags you with this stuff—it makes you feel you’re in one of those nightmares where you’re trying to run away from some threat, but move like you’re stuck in quicksand.
He also has a couple of other dastardly abilities like being able to vault over obstacles faster as well as blockading vaulting spots. Not only that, but he can make it harder for survivors to heal and he also has a special knack for breaking generators down. All of these elements make The Clown adept at corralling survivors and snuffing them out pretty efficiently.
Meanwhile, the new survivor, Kate Denson, is a singer as well as a very squiggly fighter. When captured by killers, she struggles like a slippery eel on steroids which makes it harder to get her to any nearby hook. Even if she gets hooked she’s good at wriggling off of them and getting out of Dodge.
The new map, Father Campbell’s Chapel, is decent enough. It’s a funky looking church surrounded by an asylum. Many of the assets look like regurgitated elements from other existing maps and therefore seems a little lazily cobbled together.
The Dead by Daylight – Curtain Call Chapter DLC is a decent addition to the game’s existing content. It’s pretty fun to get hunted down by a killer clown, that Is unless you suffer from coulrophobia.
SCORE: 68%
Dead by Daylight – Curtain Call Chapter DLC features great graphics that make its survival horror gameplay truly shine. However, you want to have a pretty beefy gaming PC or gaming laptop in order to play it at a decent framerate. So, you may just want to invest in a decent gaming rig:
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