Friday the 13th is my childhood horror movie series that I would watch during my favorite holiday season, Halloween, and giving me the opportunity to play as not only a counselor but Jason himself? What could be better than that?!
Friday the 13th: The Game by Gun Media is a fun game with pretty fair mechanics and perks to balance the experience to be a fun and frightening one; given you can get a game going that is.
Gameplay
Without the story mode in place yet, the only way to play is by connecting with other players online. There is no practice mode nor a proper training mode, instead you get a bunch of screenshots with an explanation of different aspects within the game to learn how to play.
Not having any way at all possible for you to train or get used to the controls and the rules of how to play the game made the first few rounds annoyingly difficult. But once you figure out how to play, it is an awesome game!
When you play as Jason, you get a few abilities that are unlocked over time in the round. Starting off with the Vision and Map ability options, to teleport anywhere in the map, finding the houses that the counselor players are in is as easy as using the Vision ability and seeing which one goes red. They won't show you exactly where, but you know they are there. Stalking around the map and chasing people is a lot of fun, especially since you can hear what the other player is saying in their mic when close enough.
Playing as the counselors can be a team effort or everyone for themselves since there are a few options to escape, and one cryptic option to kill Jason that honors the movies the game is based on. You can put a car together and escape with a friend or few, same with a boat, or fix the fuse and call the police for them to save you! It is always an intense round playing as a possible victim since you never know where Jason will show up next!
The in game chat is pretty awesome as well since, just like when Jason is killing someone, you can only hear your partners when you are within range or if one of them had a walkie talkies. But that still means everyone in the game, other than Jason, can hear the person with the mic giving a small ability to communicate with each other anywhere.
It's an invigorating game that is always fun, with the downside being the limited menu, lack of game lobbies and broken server. They really should have had that fixed before sending the game out for launch because it is a strictly multiplayer based game that can't connect to multiplayer through the one and only "Quick Join" option, forcing players to put their own parties together in order to play.
The server issue the game is having is nothing short of a disaster! I literally almost gave up within the first couple days before I reached out to the community to build a party myself. But it is said to fix soon, so I will be lightly lenient on this; they still should of delayed launch with this kind of issue though.
Check out some of my Counselor gameplay:
Graphics
Everything looks well done and nigh realistic. The detail put into the various Jason costumes, which each have a different strength and weakness list, and the outfits that were classically used in the movies for the counselors really make the experience feel similar to that witnessed in the films.
They did go with a rag doll style body physics for when a player is killed and that is possible the only bad aspect visually. Seeing somebody lose their head and their body just plops on the ground while the head often just keeps rolling and rolling around looks ridiculous. Same with a few other kills that the bodies land in very unrealistic ways ruins the vibe the gameplay gives, but not in a moment ruining way since Jason could still be very nearby.
Sounds
They used a lot of the movies music and sound effects, including the infamous whisper chant that Friday the 13th was known for. When Jason gets within a certain distance, the chant starts and when he starts chasing you the intense music starts that would indicate an upcoming death causing the already scary moment to be so much worse!
I loved that they just have constant high intensity music playing once it reaches the last two minutes mark which indicated how close Jason was to letting a few survivors slip away!
Replayability
Tons of reasons to come back! The game is amazingly fun and worth the hours of gameplay I've already invested and the many more I plan to put into this game. There is always room to improve and the higher the skills of players and knowledge of maps grows, the more intense the gameplay is going to get!
What Could Have Been Better
The servers set up and the menu options is the ultimate thing that needs to be fixed immediately! I don't understand why a game based on online multiplayer gameplay doesn't have a lobby screen option where you can scroll through lobbies of games and pick one to join. The Quick Play option would be fine if it worked, but I haven't been able to find a single game through that.
I would have preferred a better way for the dead players bodies to have reacted with the games physics, but this is not that big of a deal honestly.
Conclusion
It's an amazingly fun, addicting, scary game that is worth all the game time you put in to it, but has terrible servers and menus. That is the best way I can imagine summarizing it.
If the connection wasn't so terrible that it, at first, felt like a waste of money before figuring out how to make it work myself, then I would be glad to have given this a higher score; however, that was a big problem that everybody is having to deal with and so I think this is the most fair score given how great the actual game itself is.
