Dead by Daylight Review (Shmoo)
This game is not worth playing.
I cannot advocate more against playing this game than anything I have ever played. Dead by Daylight is likely one of the worst multiplayer games to try to pick up and play in modern gaming due to the sheer amount of complexity that is involved in learning this game. I have accumulated 1600+ hours over around a year and a half, and I can confidently say that I have a firm grasp of this game and its various mechanics, perks, killers, and techs. There is some fun to be had in this game for sure, but some fun is all you will get as it will quickly sour and turn into one of the most frustrating games you will ever play. Both sides of this asymmetrical game are extremely infuriating due to how terrible the DBD community has become and due to how incompetent Behaviour Interactive is at maintaining their biggest game with no competition.
How it feels to play killer
While playing killer, you will feel powerless and survivors will often have perks builds that intentionally torture you the entire match. A group of survivors queued together is a very common reason your matches as killer will be so insufferable due to the match becoming almost impossible to win if the survivors are good enough. Personally, I do enjoy going against high skill survivors and trying my best to outsmart them and use my own personal skill to win the match, but more than likely you will not win against these kinds of players. This makes playing killer feel almost hopeless at times because you just can’t catch a single break as you lose match after match. Trying to play fair will often result in you losing so you will almost be forced into using meta perks and “toxic” gameplay to enjoy any of your matches. As a killer player, you will have to be aware of the “Survivor Rulebook” where you prioritize their fun over your own. If you want to win the match as a killer it’s “toxic” or try-harding but when survivors want to win it’s fair for them to use every means necessary. It’s a very hard balance to maintain as you want to enjoy your match but also want to make the match fun for the survivors as I think it’s important to remember that the survivors are people who are playing the game just the same as you are. Killer gameplay can be very rewarding and satisfying at times, yet it ends up getting more and more stressful as you get less and less gameplay when you prioritize fun over winning because generators will get finished very quickly without constant babysitting.
How it feels to play survivor
While playing survivor, you will come across many toxic killers that make the game absolute hell for your team. This can be fixed by queuing with friends and working together to skew the match heavily in your favor as this game becomes extremely survivor sided once there is direct communication between the survivors. There are also many perks that can drastically improve your chances at winning as a survivor. Some of these perks have been practically unchanged from their initial release such as Dead Hard being a meta perk since it was released back in 2017 and maintaining its place as one of the best perks in the game till the modern day. This makes survivor gameplay pretty stale because you have to use perks that give you as much advantage to try and survive against killers using meta perks as well. Playing survivor can end up feeling quite good after a while, but your general experience will end up being unpleasant due to the large amount of killers and perks you have to learn to play around.
Items, Add-ons, Map Offerings
Both sides fall into this meta hell of using the best things the game allows you to use so that your matches feel less frustrating and left up to chance. Adding any sort of variety to the perks you pick increases the risk of you having no fun in your matches significantly. There are also plenty of items for survivors and killer add-ons to use as well to increase your chances of winning. These can feel necessary sometimes because of how good survivor items can be and how bad your killer's basekit can be without certain add-ons. There are also map offerings which will end up being used in many of your matches because certain maps in this game give an extreme advantage to one side or the other according to their perks or their killer. This is one of the worst parts of the game because you essentially lose the match before it even starts. They are addressing this issue, but it’s much too late.
Personal Experience/Rant
My personal experience with this game has been easily negative as it has been one of the most unfun, stressful, and anxiety filling games I have ever played. Despite my utter hate for this game, I kept playing it somehow. There’s something severely addicting about this game where it feels like you spin a slot machine to try and have fun in each match. I typically prefer playing killer because survivor solo queue is extremely unfun/inconsistent (also cause Wesker is very fun), yet I have around equal time playing killer and survivor. Even when I win a match as a killer, it feels like I haven’t won because of how unfun and stressful the typical match can end up being or it was so easy to win that it feels unsatisfying. I typically don’t even expect to win my survivor matches because I feel like when you pick survivor you shouldn’t expect to survive. The entire lore of DBD is that the survivors are supposed to be under-powered and tortured by the entity, but they end up being the ones dictating the flow of the match the higher elo you get. It feels as if the main goal of this game has become solely to win rather than enjoy the match on your own terms and that is obvious the more you play against better players. Many DBD players are chronically online and end up being some of the worst people you can interact with as they cannot take a single bit of criticism or negativity without it becoming a personal attack on them. There’s certainly some good cookies out there, but if you play this game enough you will end up playing against or with these entitled DBD addicts. They take the game much too seriously and ruin the experience for others. There’s also the competitive scene of this game which I think is a joke (no offense to the people who partake in it). DBD has to be one of the most competitively unviable games I have ever played and the majority of the games I have the most time in have been competitive games. It’s extremely unbalanced and even when played at the highest level it has to have so many rules to make it viable as a competitive game. There is also the issue of Behaviour Interactive being some of the worst developers for an extremely popular game that is constantly getting bigger and bigger media licenses for their game that they seemingly cannot fix. It feels as if there is another game breaking issue every other update or even more frequently than that. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend game development is easy, but I’m not going to let Behaviour try to convince people that the bugs and glitches they allow in the game aren’t a problem. They’ve also removed certain features of killers that had increased the skill ceiling of those killers such as Blight Hugtech being removed. This gives the implication of other skillful mechanics that weren’t intended being removed like Wesker Hugtech or Hillbilly/Oni 180 Flicks which slowly makes the game even less fun for skillful play. Wesker Hugtechs and his general gameplay have been the main reason I stuck around this game. I’m around my limit of playing this game consistently because it just isn’t fun anymore. I have no incentive to continue improving past the point I have reached because the game just isn’t worth it.
I regret playing this game.