The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Review (Tony Soprano)
Gun Interactive, the publishers, have 14 employees according to wikipedia. They have managed to acquire the intellectual property for this first film in the franchise, but failed to design a fun game play loop for the developers they contract out to make the game. They had an entire year (original release August 2023) in which the game was free on a different paid subscription platform, to fix core issues with the game design. Now that the game is no longer free with that subscription, they have still failed to deliver a fun and balanced gameplay design. The game has now gone through two different developers and the newest patch, which was to be a minor one released today, has led to majorly broken gameplay and lots of new bugs.
At it's core, the game doesn't have a fun loop. You can sit in a queue for ten minutes and a match lasts two minutes and you learn nothing. Whether the survivors rush the objective in two minutes or the family rushes the basement, the game has no clear direction of how it wants matches to be played when they quickly end within 2-3 minutes of starting or have people disconnecting due to feelings that the match up was unfair.
Loading screens still show old and inaccurate tooltips based on gameplay logic before new DLC characters were introduced. In-game tutorials on some of the minigames that are part of the escape sequence for survivor are unclear.
Some new DLC characters are very pay to win and are actually designed to trump or correct flawed gameplay logic that exists without the DLC characters in play. Examples are survivors being able to push objectives too quickly, with a paid DLC counter play of the Hans character to tamper objectives so that they instantly reset.
I think if Gun Interactive is unable to conceptualize and financially afford to contract a developer to create a fun gameplay design then they should step away from the horror genre and stop licensing intellectual property of horror franchises for videogame adaptations. They are not good at it and do not have an open line of communication with their fan base and customers through any of their public social media channels, despite having plenty of community managers through which to do so.