izigame.me

This chapter is confusing.
Lets start with the good
Taurie Cain is one of the most unique female survivor's we have ever gotten.
She is a cultist who worships the entity, and in a moment of weakness was sent to the trials. Its a very brief summary of her lore, but its unique and different in a very good way. In addition her skins are a huge departure from stale selection of bright neon skins for a female survivor. For example you can buy cultist robes for her, complete with a mask that covers her entire face which is an actual first for a survivor cosmetic I'm relatively sure. Taurie is just amazing, her voice actress (Kira Buckland the same voice actress who voices 2B from Nier Automata) put a lot of work in to making the character come alive. (A shame behaviour will have no idea how to capitalise on that) I will most likely main her
Now with the positives out of the way what did Behaviour do wrong. Lets start with Tauries perks which all fail due to behaviour having absolutely no clue what game design even remotely looks like.

Her first perk activates after you heal a survivor, when you're being healed you can use the perk to become broken. for 80-60 seconds depending on the level once the timer passes you'll be healed automatically. I love this perk, I hate 90% of survivors who insist healing every 2.5 micro seconds is the optimal play. Even though I have resilience, there's one generator left and the killer is in the middle of nowhere wasting there time. With this perk I can finally get them to leave me alone so I can carry. Only problem is, why the unnecessarily long timer and the requirement of another survivor to heal? Look I get it, the perk could get ridiculous if you made it last only 40 seconds. but the fact it takes as much time as almost an entire generator and i need to get my solo que team mates to sit still. Really hurts it, if I could maybe activate it on a self heal but it takes 20 seconds longer that would be perfect but nope. Theres also another strange downside to the perk. For example say you're near the start of the game, team mate gets injured you heal them the perk activates. Then you get chased by the killer for a bit, maybe they hook you maybe they drop chase. You find a survivor, and they begin healing you. Lets say the killer is nearby, or at least on you're side of the map, it's potentially very risky to activate the perk or maybe theres no reason too as the survivor whos healing you has perks to make the healing go quick. Whatever the case maybe, once you're healed the perk deactivates. Until you heal another survivor again.
But hey at least its not the new invocation. Crows are a mechanic that have not aged well, because depending on the map you'll either see alot of them, or there so widely spread out they're meaningless. So its nice to see a perk that involves them, However see above for why that's problematic. In addition given how inconsistent crows are, why does completing the invocation make me permanently injured. At least weaving spiders you can justify it due to the scale of its effect. But a 2 second aura reveal given to all survivors. Whenever a killer scares a crow AND a survivor is in there terror radius. That's just not as valuable at least to me as someone who's almost coming up on 5000 hours. That doesn't weaken or handicap many if any killers, and its not like this information is life changing to swfs or solos. and its also not like you can stack invocations either. So that way you can maybe get at least some value for wasting you're time holding m1 for 5 years when you could have progressed the objective
Finally shoulder the burden, is a perk that exists in the hit video game dead by daylight. Because Yes lets not actually look into tunnelling lets design another band aid fix it worked so good the last 15 times they did it.

Okay moving on to hound master and Ill say it. I think shes very fun to play sometimes. She feels like a killer straight out of Old dbd. She's unique design wise, the power is unique and breaks away from the standard dash/teleport killer. and the concept is cool as hell A pirate with a dog. You can do alot with that... Oh whats that? We wasted the entire concept on the dog basically being the entire killer? Oh... Oh nooo... And the dog isn't even good at its job.
The houndmaster has two commands they can give the dog. Chase and search.
Chase basically turns the dog into a projectile where it will dash in a direction that you aim in, and then if you press the button again you will switch to the dog and can perform a second shorter dash. (You can technically stop the dog mid dash to redirect it, but it moves so fast you'll overshoot half the time)
The hit box on both dashes is wildly inconsistent and you'll find Snug just flies past them half the time. that is if he doesn't get stuck on a wall, a rock, a twig, air. Or my personal favourite when gravity and physics unstick to him and he falls through the map! Now assuming you beat the odds and snug actually collides with a survivor he will grab them and begin pulling them. To where you may ask? Beats me, not even the ai knows half the time. Sometimes he'll pull them towards you, sometimes its in an a random direction, 90% of the time though he pulls the survivor into a pallet. Where the survivor will then press space stunning the dog and ending the grab, where they can then proceed like nothing happened. The entire grab interaction is just lame. For the killer it's fun watching the good boy go zoom and then biting a survivor and then watching them tug on there hand. but its frustrating watching them get pulled to safety half the time. Because you have absolutely no reason to ever pre drop pallets as its far safer to just play as greedy as possible because the houndmaster slows to a crawl whenever she begins charging a command. Giving you another free loop in most cases. And when you do land the grab, and there not going to instantly break free somehow. You're not exactly in any hurry to hit that survivor, it takes them an eternity to break out. you can kick a pallet walk halfway around a loop and they'll still probably be struggling. only real issue is if theres a second player nearby to perform the channel action to free them. but like if you're worried about that might I interest you in a killer who doesn't have 5000 counters for people who have working monitors? I hear Dracula is pretty good right now (ignoring the nerfs the monkeys they call the balance team did to him this patch) And on the survivor end they don't even do anything. theres no struggle mechanic, you kinda just sit there akwardly as the progress bar to break free fills up and hope you don't get hit.
You also have search which Is honestly not worth talking about. its buggy as hell you can't target what you wanna target and even when it works its so meaningless just like her perks and just like this review. While writing this, I found myself genuinely get bored halfway through. This just shouldn't have been released, I in good conscious can only review a quarter of this chapter as Houndmaster is just so unbelievably underdeveloped and unbelievably buggy I cant tell where the bugs end and her actual kit begins
This should have had more time in development, We've had so many amazing chapters recently. Castlevania, Dungeons & dragons, all things wicked. And this, is what they come up with.
Also side note. Once again a new update has broke the game. Any time theres a load screen involved theres an almost 90% chance it will freeze and i will have to alt f4 and relaunch the entire game again. i can barely play more then 2 matches before I have to relaunch the game. I wonder how long this will take to be fixed, a week? two weeks? a month and a half? Game health is always a suggestion to some companies but my god behavior belives in game pestilence