Texas Chainsaw Massacre [Review]
Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a Dead by Daylight-esc survival game based on the Texas Chainsaw horror franchise. The game was developed by Sumo Nottingham and published by Gun Interactive. The game plays virtually the same as other survivor horror games that have been coming out since Dead by Daylight’s success. You are split into teams of survivors versus a classic slasher villain. Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s unique twist is that the villains have a team of more than just one person. Often in these games, it’s many survivors versus one killer while this game has the whole cannibal family to choose from to form a 4 V 3.
Unfortunately, adding more team members to the killer's team doesn’t solve the issue of balancing issues. This genre has a common problem where the survivors are favored heavily and are often overpowered. This is incredibly apparent in this game as the leveling system is too broken. If you are a new player, the game will pair you with people already level 10 (the max level) despite not having gained any experience yet. The level tree and perks you can get are too strong to be used against lower-level players and there's no way to pair you with similarly leveled/ranked players. This makes the game incredibly frustrating and not worth the grind to catch up when everyone is already high-leveled.
It doesn’t help that it seems the survivors are overpowered. Similar to Dead by Daylight, survivors are much faster than the killers causing people to do nothing but run circles around the killer players. The survivors are also far too strong. It takes more than three hits from Leatheface’s chainsaw to even down a survivor, while a survivor can stab Leatherface once and stun him for about three seconds. Slashing someone with a chainsaw doesn’t even slow them down. While Dead by Daylight has many issues of its own at least a survivor is guaranteed to go down after two hits, and they start to slow down after one hit. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre there is nothing you can do to slow a survivor down. The survivors are simply much faster than the killers, can go in areas the killers can’t even reach, and can stun the killers with a single hit.
From the point of view of the survivor, the game doesn’t feel much like a survival game. It’s more like a game of tag as there isn’t anything else for the survivor to do. All the survivor has to do is leave, they don’t need to do as much to escape like in the Friday the 13th game, and there’s nothing to fix to open a gate. It’s very bare.
I truly wanted to like this game. Slasher films are some of my all-time favorite movies and it excites me when I get to see them brought into another genre like a video game. Unfortunately, a lot of slasher franchises are stuck on this horror survival/Dead by Daylight genre that frankly doesn’t work. It always ends up one-sided (usually favoring the survivors) and encourages toxic behavior that makes it unenjoyable online with random people. It hurts to see some of my favorite movies be recycled into a very bland and unoriginal concept. Especially as it gets rid of the point of its original genre. What’s the point of making a video game based on a slasher if the slasher villain can hardly even kill people? I can’t even recommend the game to those who like the franchise unless you have a large group of people who can fill out every slot so you don’t have to play with people online. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre game is a massacre to its slasher film inspiration and deserves a 2/10. The game is currently available on PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One and Series, and Steam.