What were my expectations going in?
Pretty high to be honest. The trailer looked amazing. Very high concept, very artsy, but with solid shooter gameplay. The levels and enemies looked really trippy, but the combat looked visceral and intense, which seemed like it would be a perfect combination. While the trailer never flat out stated it, I kinda thought there would be exploration and puzzles and things to figure out.
So how was it?
Fucking. Terrible.
The best way that I can sum Dreamkiller up is that it feels like it was designed by two different people, with two very different ideas of what they wanted to make. One was a conceptual artist wanting to make a cerebral mindbender of an experience, the other was a moron who just said "I WANNA SHOOT STUFF A LOT". Puzzles? Hah! Your only interaction with anything is shooting it. You cannot open doors, move or interact with objects, nothing.
The game looks great, but plays like a shitty, amateur Serious Sam wannabe. It feels like it was originally a wonderful concept and great idea, but it wound up being made by someone who has no idea what makes a good shooter. I love the plot and the art designs of the whole thing, but the actual core gameplay is just sloppy and bad. AI is retarded, and enemies are thrown at you with no rhyme or reason. Literally, I have backed myself against a wall in a tight fight, and had things spawn behind me or underfoot. I'm all right with a wild nonstop shooter, but spawning things like that is where I start to call bullshit.
Now I know it's an indie game, but the graphics are pretty sad. It's hard to tell in the screenshots I'm including, but this game came out in 2009, but looks like it came out in 2001. A lot of it is in the animations; every enemy is indistinguishable from the one next to it. The enemies are also kind of bland and repetitive. Each level pretty much contains two different enemies, a "soldier" type and a "swarmer" type, as I've always classified them. Sometimes you'll get a third, like a "heavy" or something, but not often. They're all nearly identical throughout the level, with very minor variants. This one has red eyes and shoots fire, and this other one is identical but has green eyes and spits acid. You can pretty much rest assured that whatever you see in the first 30 seconds of a level, that's all you're going to be fighting the entire time. The boss of each level is just a big version of one of the normal enemies. Woo.
This could almost be forgivable, if the weapons were fun to use. They're not. None of the weapons are fun. Your natural attacks, a flame spell and some kind of wind spell, are weak and ineffectual after the first level. From there, each level lets you carry ONE gun, but even those are not enjoyable to use. They're either painfully slow, or they have a refractory period that prevents you from cutting loose, when it's the style of game where you NEED to cut loose. Thank goodness they have infinite ammo, or it would be a total loss. The guns have little to no feel to them, and you never get a feeling of any kind of power. Shame, too, because they're actually really neat looking guns.*
Oftentimes a game lives or dies by its mechanics. If this is the case, Dreamkiller needs to have its plug pulled. From the get go, the game gives you a bunch of vague HUD indicators, and never tells you what's what. I kind of sussed out that the red droplets were my health, but was thrown by the droplets turning into flames if I grabbed a health pickup (all pickups in the game are colored dreamcatchers, naturally). Watching combat showed me that the little green gear was my weapon charge, which the game refers to as concentration. The fangs icon confused the hell out of me, until the game explained that killing sprees trigger berserker rage, which seemed oddly out of character for Alice. Hooray for nonsensical, shoehorned-in mechanics. Don't even get me started on the useless teleportation ability.
The worst mechanic in the game, which it seems to trumpet with pride, is one where certain enemies will exist in the deeper subconscious. You can see them, but they're red and transparent. You can't hurt them, but they can hurt you. The only way to defeat them is by finding a glowy portal, and entering this deeper subconscious. While in this deeper level, your concentration drains, and once it hits zero, your health begins to drain. The object is to kill them quickly and get out. It's obnoxious, adds nothing to the game, and yet it happens several times in every single level.
Keeping the general "failure" theme with the rest of the game, the sound is terrible. This game has some of the worst voice acting I've heard in a long time, delivering some of the cheesiest, hackneyed dialogue I've heard in a long time. The woman doing the voice for Alice sounds like she's trying, but she just doesn't have the acting chops for it. The few supporting voices are just awful. Even the sound effects fall completely short! Enemies make very generic growls and snarls, and the weapons sound weak. Perhaps the worst offender is the shotgun-style weapon, which makes this nails-on-a-chalkboard wheezing sound after every single shot. Of course, this is one of the most useful weapons in the game, so you get to hear that charming sound quite often.
Well how about the controls? It's a first person shooter, right, how bad could they be? Eh. I wouldn't consider this a bright spot, so much as the area where the game sucked the least. As mentioned above, they're sloppy. The mouse is far too sensitive, and the sensitivity slider bar in the options menu does fuckall, so the entire game feels loose and slippery. Beyond that, the game is so minimal that you never really need any other controls. This is actually why I never even realized there was a teleport ability; with no other keys to use beyond WASD, it never occurred to me to even try hitting Q.
I think perhaps the worst part of Dreamkiller, and this is often what can make a bad game worse for me, is how much potential it has. A bad game is a bad game, and I can forget about it. But when a game has so much potential to be amazing, like this one, it just seems to make the bad feel exponentially worse.
The graphics may be crap on a technical level, but the art design of the game is incredibly creative, and each level beautifully captures the phobia it's meant to represent. I loved the level flow, or lack thereof. A lot of the time, it genuinely feels like a dream. You can be in one locale, walk through a door, and be in a completely different world. In the first level, several dark streets, tunnels, and caves lead into each other at random; a dark alley takes a sharp turn into a forgotten dark temple deep underground. And yet at one point, in a shadowy pit of rubble, a crack in the wall (that I could not fit through) revealed into a tropical paradise with a yacht gently bobbing in the waves. An abandoned orphanage morphs into an insane asylum, which gives way into a giant chest cavity where you run along the veins and arteries surrounding the dreamer's heart. The visuals are very creative in this game, and really kept me going.
But there's a fine line between dream logic and just bad game design. By the fifth or sixth level (out of 12), I realized that I was pushing on for progress, but I really just was not having any fun at all. And the game severs emotional ties that could have really drawn the player into the game. I wish we could actually meet the subjects whose dreams we were entering, and get to know them, even in a cutscene. Instead we get a case file detailing their phobia and a single picture. It takes away any and all gravitas of the level and just makes Dreamkiller a pretty, hollow experience.
Poor gameplay, bad acting, and a metric ton of wasted potential means that this game is not worth your time or your money. I actually had really high hopes for this one, and it just left me feeling disappointed and frustrated.
Please, stay away from this steaming pile of shit.
Play time: 5 hours
Finished: Nope. Shut it off and wiped it from my hard drive at about halfway in.
Recommended: As a lesson on how to ruin a great concept by making a shitty game
Available For: PC
* - A little side note that didn't really fit into the core review -
The guns are held in a bizarre perspective. Holding one large lightning gun, when Alice reloads and puts another clip into the top with her RIGHT hand, given the size of the gun and how she'd have to hold it, it looks like another arm reaches over her shoulder. At other times, her left arm reaches out at an angle that implies she either has a second elbow, or her arm begins two feet in front of her torso.
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