I don’t believe in “no matter, that’s good.”If a movie is particularly bad, I’d rather not waste my time, because I don’t find particularly bad movies interesting on any level. So I probably haven’t watched the low-budget cult horror movie Killer Klowns From Outer Space for 25 years, when I was a horror-loving kid who didn’t know yet that he didn’t like “so bad, that’s good”.”This means that at first I was not enthusiastic about a game based on this movie, despite my appreciation for the burgeoning asymmetric horror multiplayer genre. It turns out that Killer Klowns is a surprisingly nuanced PvP horror game with enough sugary silliness not to be taken too seriously. Instead of “so bad, it’s good,” it’s just good.
Killer Klowns follows games like Dead By Daylight, Friday the 13th and the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, pitting player against player in a familiar horror landscape. In this game, players are divided into lobbies of three deadly klowns against seven survivors who are trying to survive them and escape from the map within 15 minutes. Although each asymmetrical horror game has taken its own path, Killer Klowns looks a bit like the Jason Voorhees game from Illfonic and plays it, which I think is only a good thing. It is not a clone, but where it is similar, it is welcome, and where it is different, it usually works too.
The survivors will have to look for tools such as melee weapons and health kits and, more importantly, locate and activate one of the many exits on one of the several sprawling maps, each of which is equipped with complex shortcuts for discovering and learning routes so that an experienced survivor can achieve a certain distance in the middle of himself and the squeaky shoes of a klown on the heels. Meanwhile, the klowns are tasked with patrolling the map and finishing all the humans by either actioning them directly or hanging them up like human-sized cotton candy cocoons until they fade.
This format means that victory and defeat are not so important, since klowns can finish several survivors, while others escape, and the final count can replant a so-called “modest” or even “mediocre”victory to one or the other side. Sure, a perfect win can be achieved, but in my 15 hours with the game, the community didn’t seem to be too invested in this area, which is actually a nice change from the extremely competitive Dead By Daylight. The survivors certainly want to escape, but I’ve found that because the rounds are so unpredictable and the stakes are never that high I’m being chased by a clumsy clown, after all, not Leatherface or Jason it’s still fun even when losing.
I owe this constant fun to many facets of the game. First and foremost, it’s a pleasure to walk around and hide from these cartoonish villains. To dive into the dense bushes or into a garbage container, to catch a glimpse of the passage of the pursuers is exciting every time. And although the melee mechanics feel strange and catched up, it works for both sides in such a way that it’s fun to get into a close action with a klown and maybe even live to tell the story.
When klowns are defeated, they are sent to a respawn screen that takes about 45 seconds to get them back into the game, so it’s also beneficial to be an aggressive gold player or just a group of players sticking together. You can clear the map of one or more clowns for a limited time and significantly improve the tasks of the game, for example. finding gasoline, spark plugs, key cards, and finishing the cotton candy barriers that line each exit, some of which may have been fixed by the klowns in the middle of the game.
One thing I don’t appreciate is the movement speed of the game, or maybe it’s really a problem with animations. When I’m playing as a human, I can squat-walk to avoid making noise, walk to make a little noise, or sprint to make a lot of noise. Because the walking speed feels so slow, I want to run all the time, but since I know it’s not smart, I’m going through a situation that would at least make me run or jog in real life. I think even just changing the animation of walking to a slow jog would feel psychologically superior, because instead what remains to the players seems to be too careless for what the game affectionately calls Klownpocalypse.
On the other hand, one of the best novelties of the game is how it treats you after you expiredd or escaped as a survivor. Instead of sitting idly by while a round might take another 10 minutes, you can opt for quick event mini-games that honour you with items that you can then gift to allies who are still trying to escape-by dropping them directly into your inventory as a gift from an invisible benefactor, or you can pocket them for yourself in matter a survivor can use the one-time Respawn machine that brings back all the dead people.
It is a great addition not only to the game, but also to the genre, as it solves the often-seen problem of being dead or escaped earlier than your allies, and then usually just sitting there. It wouldn’t always work, but the IP Killer Klowns magically make their gifted items appear in front of the players, and everything is handled with a fun tone and colorful graphics that all scream “arcade video games around 1988″.”
Playing as klown is a bit like playing Jason in Illfonic’s previous efforts. They are equipped with several abilities, some of which are unique to certain classes, and each of them during cooldowns, as well as weapons such as a cotton candy gun that captures survivors, a popcorn gun that makes sounds at its targets for a short time, and a great hammer (of course), which, among other things, is used to tie up at close range. As with people, it is beneficial for the Klown team to work together and have a plan, because some temperamental people can choose a solo klown as a traveling gang of thugs with baseball bats looking for red noses. The cards look bigger in Killer Klowns than in Friday the 13th, so tripling the enemies doesn’t feel annoying, but rather unique.