Friday 13 The Game
When we published our review in progress of Friday the 13th last week, it was after a couple days of playing relatively smooth matches on PC. Since launch day, the PC version has remained our go-to option, but more out of necessity than by choice. On both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Friday the 13th has been intermittently unplayable. Yes, private matches with friends are sometimes possible, but if you wish to join up with a band of strangers online for a bout of deadly hide-and-go-seek from the comfort of your couch, you're either entirely out of luck or stuck waiting upwards of ten minutes for a match--after days of not being able to play at all.
Developers Gun Media and Illfonic are on the case, providing frequent updates that seem to be improving the situation in minor ways, but for reasons involving platform holders' patching policies and new bugs that emerge with continued testing, it's hard to imagine Friday the 13th being anything other than a half-baked experience for the foreseeable future.
Even if servers were up to speed and able to keep up with the purported influx of eager players, you could still look at Friday the 13th and ask yourself if it would have been better off released as an early access game. The answer is "yes." The dearth of maps, inconsistent frame rate on consoles, laughable animations, and shoddy collision detection are evidence of a game that isn't ready for prime time.
That multiplayer mode doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on what it wants to be. Friday the 13th: The Game feels torn between its competing desires to be a horror game, a balanced, competitive and fun multiplayer experience, and a wish-fulfilling Jason Voorhees simulator.
Friday the 13th: The Game is a third-person horror, survival game in which players assume the role of a teen counselor, or for the first time ever, Jason Voorhees. You and six other unlucky souls will do everything possible to escape and survive while the most well-known killer in the world tracks you down and brutally slaughters you. Friday the 13th: The Game will strive to give every single player the tools to survive, escape or even try to take down the man who cannot be killed. Each and every gameplay session will give you an entirely new chance to prove if you have what it takes not only to survive, but to best the most prolific killer in cinema history, a slasher with more kills than any of his rivals. Meanwhile, Jason will be given an array of abilities to track, hunt and kill his prey. Stalk from the shadows, scare your targets and kill them when the time is right in as brutal a fashion as you can imagine.
We love seeing an expert getting excited about their favourite subject. Whether it’s a highly skilled chef, an impassioned music expert, or a developer with a love for rubbish ‘80s horror flicks, we find their enthusiasm infectious no matter the topic. The makers of this game clearly love Friday The 13th with a passion, and they’re right in thinking that it does have a lot of potential for being made into a video game. We just wish they’d actually finished it before releasing it.
We’ve seen a few Friday The 13th films over the years, but except for the one in space we couldn’t begin to tell you what ones they were – which we assume is probably true for most non-fans. But not the makers of this game. Developer IllFonic and publisher Gun Media clearly have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Jason Voorhees, and we can’t help but respect that.
Each round of Friday the 13th: The Game is a one act improv play. One player is cast as classic drowning victim turned murder guy Jason Voorhees, while seven camp counselors scramble to escape gruesome deaths at his giant hands. Have your head squished early on and you become an audience member, sometimes for several minutes while Jason stalks the other players around a darkened summer camp, tearing them apart for Mother.
I get mad at Rocket League, and mad at Overwatch, but I don’t mind having my head stomped on in Friday the 13th all that much—it's just my role in the play. And after death, the solidarity I feel for the other campers keeps me flipping through the spectator cameras, cheering for them as they repair a car, only for Jason to smash the hood and rip one of them out of their seat while the other bolts into the woods. And then the fleeing survivor stumbles across my decapitated body, automatically shrieks (there's a fear system), and Jason materializes behind him. Even in death, I’m still part of the show—I wish there were a corpsing button that let me break scene to laugh at my costar for losing his arms.
Friday the 13th has a fairly straightforward premise: you and eight other online players are thrust into a campground from the '80s as camp counselors, with the exception of one player who has the good fortune of being selected as Jason. His job is to, you guessed it, horrifically kill every counselor. This is done through many means including but not limited to: axes to the crotch region, throwing fools through windows, bear hugs, gouging eyes, and punching heads off entirely.
As a counselor, the goals are a tad more broad and involve escaping through various methods or waiting the night out. For example, counselors can find car parts scattered throughout cabins to repair a car and drive off the property, or look for a fuse to fix a call box and ring the police for help. If counselors are bold enough, they can also attempt to stun or even kill Jason with weapons found throughout the map, although this is apparently extremely difficult and near impossible.
The game they’ve come up with is an asynchronous multiplayer game, of the sort that looked like it was going to become popular a few years ago – until it didn’t. The closest comparison is probably Evolve, in that one player gets to be the monster (i.e. Jason) and everyone else is stuck playing as mere humans. Horror movies are the perfect inspiration for this sort of thing and the set-up also reminds us of the original cat and mouse idea that evolved into Alien Isolation. Especially as both games have a similar obsession with recreating the look and feel of the films in video game form.
While escape happens on occasion, the intention of the game is clearly to give Jason all the tools in the world to kill off the counselors. In the vast majority of matches that I played, almost all of the counselors inevitably died.
While Jason has a wide variety of gory ways to kill counselors in Friday the 13th: The Game, the film series is more than the sum of its violence. The game’s presentation is desperate to evoke the films wherever it can, but it misses one of the series’ most important elements: the tone. The movies blend together horror and humor; though ultimately doomed to die, characters never lack for ridiculous things to say. At Camp Crystal Lake it was never the wrong time for a campy joke.
These issues are disappointing, but not only on the principle of meeting the expectations of a finished product. There is a good game in Friday the 13th that pops its blood-soaked head up every now and then. Its asymmetrical teenager-versus-supernatural-murderer premise is one that will speak to anyone with an affinity for survival games, cooperative problem solving, and '80s slasher films. It has great potential, which is why you can't help but be frustrated to see it left unrealized, if not outright squandered.
A single match lasts 20 minutes, and that time will either fly by or feel twice as long depending on which role you're randomly assigned to. As a camp counselor, you are set free in one of three maps pulled from early Friday the 13th films, and are tasked with either repairing escape vehicles, calling the cops, hiding from Jason until the end of the match, or killing him--an obtuse and complex process that the game never explains, let alone hints at. If you are the lucky one who's picked at random to play Jason, your only goal is to kill every counselor that you can get your hands on.
Playing as Jason is without a doubt the most enjoyable time you'll have with Friday the 13th. As the lone killer, you are essentially unstoppable, and you gain new abilities over the course of a match that increase both your awareness and mobility. Jason can warp from one end of a camp to the other, rush across large stretches of land (think Evil Dead's encroaching force), detect fearful or active counselors, and silence the haunting theme that usually plays when he's approaching a target. He will also earn the strength to bust through doors rather than hack them open, a skill that directly thwarts a counselor's best line of defense: shelter. Playing as Jason is the epitome of a power fantasy.
The developers at IllFonic got the feeling of playing as this menacing character right, and it’s really fun to methodically hunt down your prey. As the match goes on you slowly gain more supernatural powers like Sense (think Eagle Vision in Assassin’s Creed) and Morph, which lets you warp anywhere on the map. Not only are these a good explanation of how Jason can seem to be everywhere at once in the movies, they make you feel powerful and in control of the situation. The situation being that there are some teens that need murderin’.
When caught, a counselor has a small chance to fight back by staggering Jason with a single-use weapon such as a pocket knife or a flare gun. But most of the time, once Jason has someone in his grasp, they are as good as dead. There are several places to hide, which include tucking yourself into an armoire, a camping tent, or under a mattress, but Jason can still find you if the counselor you're controlling is prone to yelp in fear--an automated process triggered by the sight of Jason. Pick a counselor with a high stealth rating, and you'll have an easier time waiting out a match from the safety of a confined space. It's a boring but effective way to "win."
If you instead choose to escape rather than simply avoid Jason, you will have to poke around every available building in search of items like keys, fuel, and batteries to repair nearby cars and boats. Items are placed at random locations, so you never know exactly where to look. Teamwork then becomes important as you can coordinate your efforts to simultaneously search multiple buildings and report Jason sightings as you go. This is of course assuming that your fellow counselors are not only wearing chat-enabled headsets, but that they are willing to lead or be led at all. Playing with friends makes this easy; playing with strangers does not.
Friday the 13th: The Game, by comparison, is nearly devoid of actual dialog. Characters look like rubber action figures held over a campfire for too long, and they cycle through a mere three or four benign exclamations when you complete an objective. Maybe the lack of chatter is meant to build tension, but all it accomplishes is sapping the onscreen personas of any kind of personality.
It all makes for an airless world. The creative, over-the-top kills in Friday the 13th have always been its spark, but when the rest of the world is lifeless the violence seems out of place, an overly sadistic extravagance in an otherwise banal game.
The problem with asymmetric multiplayer games, and the reason they didn’t become popular, is that a) it’s always more fun to be the monster and b) the number of strategies involved, for either side, soon prove disappointingly limited. Friday The 13th does suffer from both these problems, but because its roots are in survival horror, rather than online shooters, it’s an immediately more interesting proposition.
If you’re the one with the hockey mask (or bag on their head, if you’re playing as one of Jason’s earlier incarnations) it’s your job to stalk the other seven players and kill them before the time limit is up. At the start of a match all the ‘counselors’ run off and you have to track them down one by one. Any sound they make is shown on-screen as a radar-like blip, but you also have a number of magic powers to aid your stalking.
On the hunt
Playing as Jason means you won't have to spend half the round spectating, but it’s not necessarily more fun. Jason is chosen randomly from the group, though if you prefer playing murderer, you can set a preference to be picked more often.
The most important part of being Jason, to me, is to make what ostensibly should be unfun for the counselors (getting murdered) more fun. I once cornered a player early in a match, and as he protested—”It’s so early in the game!”—we came to an unspoken understanding: knife duel. Rather than going in for a grab, I took a swing at him. I missed, and he returned a swing and stunned me.
He skittered off, and when I came to I teleported away (Jason has a few supernatural abilities which can be used more frequently as the match progresses) to find someone else. There isn’t much joy in ending someone else’s round as early as possible (when it happens I'm usually apologizing as I drive an axe through their face) and on top of that, the pressure is always on—if I’m busy breaking down a cabin door, in the back of my mind I know another survivor is across the map trying to repair the boat. Sometimes I let someone live for the moment because I suspect there’s more important prey to be had.
Despite its many issues, Friday the 13th is still a fun time and has potential to be even better if they can deliver on the campaign mode and the addition of AI players. Even given the unbalanced nature of the game, it’s the thrill and adrenaline that truly make it unique and continually enjoyable.
There aren’t many games that can offer a camaraderie aspect to the survival horror genre, and Friday the 13th delivers in that regard. It could certainly use a lot more fine tuning and adjustments, but for now, it delivers on a solidly campy experience.
When you’re playing as Jason, this is unquestionably the best Friday the 13th game ever made. I really appreciate the genuine love for the franchise on display here. Hunting down players and executing them in spectacularly gory scenes is an homage that warms my lifelong Friday-fan heart. But the fun of its asymmetrical multiplayer-only action is heavily skewed toward Jason, which means you’ll mostly be stuck playing as teens rummaging through drawers. Despite that lopsided gameplay and some pretty heinous glitches, there is some dumb fun to be had here – which is all the movies ever really offered, anyway.
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