Asymmetrical horror games, like Halloween: The Game, aren’t known for having evergreen shelf lives. What typically happens is that casual players — essential to sustaining things in the long run — grow tired of repeating the same old routine, and quickly get outpaced by those who’ve dedicated their every waking moment to getting in extra practice sessions (as though they’re training for some kind of Olympic event).
After the honeymoon period has elapsed, these obsessives are the ones likeliest to stick around, and they end up defining the norms and codes of conduct for the experience going forward. So, if you want to stand even the faintest chance of scraping by, you’ll have to keep up with them by studiously researching the ever-evolving META of the game in question and calibrating your loadouts to become nigh-on-invulnerable.
This alienating of novices is as inevitable a part of the asym life cycle as a buggy launch or the eventual cessation of developer support. Still, we hoped that it would take a bit longer for Halloween: The Game to become so unwelcoming and gentrified. The hyper-competitive weirdos and self-anointed “bully squads” could have at least waited until after the titular holiday had passed before spoiling the fun for the rest of us!
Alas, IllFonic’s title has already been infected with the teabagging bullshit that always plagues these things, and anyone naively hoping to dip their toes in now — to celebrate October 31st — is in for a world of pain. Short of a high school gym class or perhaps the abyssal depths of the ocean, you’d be hard-pressed to find an environment that is less hospitable and that subjects its weakest inhabitants to quite as much antagonism.
2 Months After Launch, Michael Myers Has Become the One Being Hunted
It’s not really fair to criticise a game for grievances that are beyond the developers’ control, and you’ll find bad apples in any online community. Yet there’s no getting around the fact that, just two months after launch, Halloween has a rather nasty troll problem. One that makes it difficult to recommend to newbies who just want to enjoy themselves this spooky season.
Anyone but the most competent of Michaels will struggle to hold their own against toxic rivals here, as tiresome griefers have learned (in record time) how to completely dismantle the intended experience. As a result of their nonsense, the once-terrifying boogeyman is no longer an unperturbable force of evil, but rather a pitiable wretch trying to cope with a spate of nuisance behaviour from Haddonfield’s unruly youth.
In what feels tantamount to elder abuse, civilians will gang up to tauntingly loop the glacial killer around vehicles, prevent him from phasing into his incorporeal shape-jump form (by surveilling him from all angles), bombard him with confusing racial slurs and, in what’s become a bit of a meme, repeatedly mow him down with bicycles. Michael isn’t even necessarily guaranteed to prevail in knife fights against a party of trolls anymore, as they can easily stun-lock him if they’re not focused on playing the objective, which is just kind of sad.
After all, wreaking havoc with a blade is meant to be this legendary slasher’s whole M.O., and yet now he’s being shown up by addlepated stoners and 80-pound prom queens.
It’s an undignified state of affairs, to say the least, and robs the killer of any menace he once possessed. Indeed, little of the initial power-fantasy thrill remains in Michael gameplay at this point. Half the time, the iconic villain is fleeing from baseball-bat-wielding teens (not the other way around), and hunting down player-controlled characters has become an exercise in sheer frustration.
Granted, PvP isn’t meant to be your sole focus when taking on the murderer role — given that there are plenty of NPC residents in Haddonfield for you to slice, dice, and asphyxiate— but sometimes it’s an unavoidable part of the scenario. And it’s one that’s becoming increasingly grating with each passing day.
If you think this is a skill issue on our part, we seem to consistently achieve “Overwhelming Victories” when playing as civilians ourselves. So, there’s obviously something amiss. Eluding, or even downing, Michael has become trivial, and it’s not uncommon to see matches conclude without a single fatality occurring, often because your opponent has justifiably rage-quit.
It’s not fun if you’re the killer and — unless you’re one of the offending rage-baiters — it’s not even very fun to be a civilian in these circumstances either. Instead, it’s just kind of deflating, because you’re being denied that authentic Halloween experience that the game is sold on. Honestly, we’ve found ourselves actively rooting for Michael to take retribution on our own teammates on more than one occasion, as they were being such poor sports.
Patches Have Dramatically Improved Stability Since Launch
In these asymmetrical horror releases, taking your turn as the slasher should be cause for excitement. Yet in Halloween, it feels like a civic duty at best (that someone has to take on to facilitate the match) and a humiliation ritual at worst.
Through trial and error, we’ve figured out how to disrupt the worst underhanded tactics. For instance, activating the “Evil Presence” buff in the vicinity of a survivor who’s trying to loop you (or prevent you from shape jumping) can cause them to stumble, helping you to close the gap and maybe opening up the window for a perfect grab attack. Meanwhile, entering the “Killer Sense” view to fully stalk griefers will make it harder for them to mess you around when you do finally catch up to them.
Still, it’s a pity to have to focus on anticipating the bad behaviour of others in this way, when you should just be having a blast roleplaying as the motherfucking Boogeyman! It’s especially vexing since the foundations of Halloween: The Game are extremely solid, and it’s also come a long way since our wobbly first impressions.
When we reviewed the title back in September, we fretted over how we couldn’t “in good conscience overlook serious issues that [were] dampening our enthusiasm for it”. This was in reference to a smorgasbord of mechanical bugs, game-breaking glitches, hardlocks, softlocks, and assorted crashes that tarnished the early-access period.
Survivors would regularly find themselves unable to move after equipping certain items; they’d get caught up in either looping animations or on the scenery itself and, if they were really unlucky, were liable to fall through the map into some kind of purgatorial liminal space. Michael didn’t emerge from this jankfest unscathed either, often spawning without a functioning cooldown for his traversal abilities, forcing him to prowl the map at the pace of continental drift.
Not to mention there was a litany of other faults related to matchmaking, unresponsive bots, and perk cards failing to activate. In short, it was virtually impossible to get through a play session without encountering some kind of critical malfunction.
We’re pleased to report, then, that the game is in a much healthier state two months down the line. The vast majority of its teething issues have been resolved, and it’s an all-round smoother experience. What few bugs do remain at this stage are predominantly visual in nature, and can even be sort of endearing if you are willing to forgive the occasional lapse. Watching residents vampirically glide around households as they perform domestic chores is always good for a laugh.
Not only has Halloween dramatically improved in terms of stability, but the steady rollout of patches has also helped to address some balancing niggles. Item spawn rates have been judiciously tweaked, meaning that Haddonfield is no longer littered with a preposterous amount of bolt cutters; Michael’s damage output scales more appropriately with his bloodthirst level. incentivising you to patiently stalk targets and not just run around mindlessly swinging an axe; the A.I. has finally acquired the beginnings of self-preservation instincts; and victims can now be more easily detected in the nail-biting climax of a match so they can no longer just wait out the clock cowering in dumpsters.
Were it not for those infuriating bully squads exploiting the odd lingering oversight, we’d say that the civilian/killer dynamic has been pretty much nailed. Indeed, when everyone is playing in good faith, Halloween: The Game is a dream come true for horror fans. Matches unfold with the classic slasher structure, and the various systems come together to produce all kinds of dynamic scenes that feel as though they’ve been ripped straight from your favourite scary movie.
We’ve had agonising narrow escapes as civilians and orchestrated sublime jump scares as their adversary. We’ve drowned victims in toilets, singed their flesh against kitchen stoves, and mounted them on coat racks. We’ve organically assumed the role of a final girl: leaping through windows, hiding in closets, fending off our tormenter with a fire poker and breaking free from his grasp before evacuating the town by the skin of our teeth; in one electrifying instance, with a single percentage point of HP left.
That is what Halloween: The Game should, and occasionally does, feel like. When everything is allowed to unfold properly — and it isn’t just a bunch of dickheads running around a car for 20 minutes — it can be truly cinematic and intense.
The Tower Farm Terror DLC Adds Welcome Variety
Given that IllFonic has quite rightly been concentrating on fixing their product over the past two months, they haven’t had a chance to implement much in the way of new content yet. A recent patch did add another contextual execution— whereby Michael skewers his target against a junction box — and they’ve controversially removed the sex minigame in order to prevent Dr. Loomis from committing statutory rape. Otherwise, the core offering is more or less unchanged from where it was at the start.
That’s all set to change now, however, with the game’s first-ever DLC drop. Dubbed “Tower Farm Terror”, this expansion is essentially comprised of two separate halves. There’s the titular map situated on the rural outskirts of Haddonfield, and then there are the extra cosmetics that can be unlocked for a premium.
The former is an excellent and, crucially, free supplement to the map rotation that provides a refreshing change of scenery. Up until now, the “night he came home” has taken place against an exclusively suburban backdrop, the single-player’s brief stop at Smith’s Grove Sanitarium notwithstanding, but the Tower Farm has a much more rustic flavour.
It’s probably the most unique environment the game’s offered so far, with far more open space and distinctive features that fundamentally alter the flow of chases. The sprawling cornfields, for example, provide both hunter and prey alike with ample opportunity to hide during protracted cat-and-mouse face-offs.
We also love how, out of all the maps currently available, it’s the one that best embraces the All Hallows’ Eve atmosphere. Set during the middle of harvest celebrations, it’s got a real cosy autumnal vibe — at least until the bloodletting starts — and there’s nowhere else in the game where you’re liable to see quite so many pumpkins. There’s even a Sleepy Hollow scarecrow with a jack-o’-lantern for a head!
It would have been nice if they could have shaken up the stale civilian objectives a little more, but, on the plus side, the map does provide new contextual kills and a scythe weapon for Michael. When wielded, the latter enables you to perform broad sweep attacks that can hit multiple targets at once, as well as a pair of especially brutal finishers. You can find it lying around the farm, or you can equip it as a starter weapon if you purchase the new 1989 skin for Michael.
On that note, the “Tower Farm Terror” update also introduces a few premium cosmetics that can be purchased individually. There are two Mikey costumes up for grabs at f$9.99 each (the aforementioned one taken from Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers and a 2018 one based on David Gordon Green’s reboot). We’d argue that these aren’t quite as momentous as when new Dead by Daylight killers debut, however, or even when you’d unlock a new Jason in Friday the 13th: The Game. Neither of the looks are too dissimilar from the standard version of the boogeyman and are essentially still just a man in mechanic’s coveralls and a spray-painted William Shatner mask (turns out the Shape isn’t as much of a fashionista as some of his slasher contemporaries).
What does add a bit more colour and vibrancy to the proceedings is the “Civilian Costumes Pack”. Also priced at $9.99, this gives existing survivor characters the opportunity to don fancy dress attire, including firefighter, pirate, sexy cat and witch outfits. Obviously, this release has been timed to coincide with the trick-‘r-treating season, but we’d be eager to see more wacky cosmetics like these added in the future. Another thing we’d like to commend the developers for here is applying the Halloween getups to NPC residents as well, so even if you don’t shell out for the costume pack, you still get to see them in action.
In addition to this, two new survivors have also been added to the roster (again, for a cost). There are some Twitch drops taking place over the coming days, and you’ll have a chance to unlock adorable “Ghoul Googles” if you manage to complete a limited-time challenge before the end of the month. We can’t fault any of these new inclusions, and it’s pleasing to see that Halloween is properly getting into the spirit of its namesake holiday.
In terms of content and stability, then, the game has unquestionably come a long way. What we’d like to see IllFonic target next is some of the outstanding balancing issues and those infuriating bully squads, because it would be a real shame if bad actors drove people away from a product that, in every other respect, is on the right trajectory.
Oh, and for the love of all that is holy, please let us customise our loadouts while waiting for everyone to ready up in the lobbies!
Halloween: The Game, along with its first post-launch DLC, is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store.