Halloween: The Game Review – Evil Takes Shape
For a horror franchise as long-lasting as the Halloween series, you would have thought there would be more video games based on the property released over the years. While there have been a few, the majority of Michael Myers’ appearances in the gaming realm has been as a guest spot in series like Mortal Kombat, Dead by Daylight, and even Call of Duty.
Now Michael Myers and the Halloween franchise finally get their time to shine on their own with the release of Halloween: The Game — the latest multiplayer horror game from the developers who brought us Friday The 13th: The Game, Illfonic.
Multiplayer With a Little Bit of Single -Player
Halloween: The Game is designed first and foremost as an online survival horror game, with the game automatically defaulting to the multiplayer option upon loading. However, we will start by discussing the game’s single-player campaign as it serves as a good tutorial and introduction to the game itself before diving into multiplayer right away.
You can very much tell that Halloween: The Game was designed entirely as a multiplayer experience at first, and then the developers decided to add in a single player later. That single-player mode is known as Michael’s Story and tells the story of Michael Myers from the beginning of the first movie, as he escapes from Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, through the end of the first movie. This is split across a prologue chapter and five additional chapters that do not take very long to complete if you rush through them.
If you play the multiplayer first and have played as Michael, you will already know pretty much everything you need to know about single player’s gameplay, as it’s the exact same. Really, though, it’s best to play the single player first, since it gradually teaches you Michael’s different abilities, like his Killer Sense and Shape Jump. Blackout, and Detection Pulse. Then, by the time you jump into multiplayer, you already know either how to use Michael or perhaps how to best counter or be ready for his special moves. I love the different techniques that they give Michael in this game, but Shape Jump has to be my favorite as you phase into like a realm of darkness as long as you are not standing under light, and can then move all around the map without being spotted until you phase back in. This is a really easy way to move around the map more quickly and is just a really cool technique to have in the game.
This is also where you get a good chance to master Michael’s stalking techniques, where you can focus in on others and reach higher level stalks and unlock additional special kill types. I enjoyed the variety of kills you can find in the game, with some clearly inspired by the games and others just thrown in there for fun. In some ways, this reminded me of the very underrated and not talked about The Punisher game for Xbox and PS2 where you can do a variety of different kills depending on the environment around you. These aren’t quite to that degree or detail and such, but it still was fun to try out the different kills across multiple playthroughs of each stage. It was also cool reaching Bloodthirsty status, which allows for extra kills and more after killing a certain number of people.
The different chapters do a decent job at giving you the very bare minimum of story beats for the first movie, such as showing Michael killing his sister originally and his descent into darkness from there. You get to take part in many of the signature kills from the movie too, including the aforementioned sister Judith Myers, Annie, Bob, and Lynda. However, there are also a number of characters that are more than just residents in some of the earlier chapters that you must kill to advance, including Tanya, Slab, and Eric. It does make sense that they had to add some other characters to kill considering the movie only had so many, but it’s too bad we didn’t see more from follow-up movies and such involved here. Even with the extra padding, the chapters are super short if you are just doing the main story missions. In fact, you could easily beat the full story mode in under an hour if you were just pushing throw, maybe even 30 minutes if you are skipping the cutscenes.
Something that does add a little more longevity to the single player though are challenges and collectible recordings. Each of the six total chapters have six challenges for you to complete, which vary in difficulty. Sometimes these are as simple as killing a specific character in a specific fashion that matches up with the movie death while others are much more vague like killing three residents in a chapter. The hardest of these by far are the ones where the goal is to not be detected at all, which makes things very difficult. This is especially hard in Chapter 5 where you try to escape without Loomis detecting you, which is much easier said than done. In fact, these were about the only challenges I eventually gave up on completing due to the game’s AI not being the best at times and causing you to be detected after what should have been a perfect fun. This is seen right away on the prologue chapter and carried over to some of the others.
Completing these challenges also rewards you with specific cosmetics for multiplayer. Thankfully, the challenges specifically state what reward you will get for completing it before you even do it so. This allows you to weigh how much time you want to spend trying to complete the challenges for what the cosmetic item is. Also coming into play, you must completely finish the chapter again after completing said task to have it count, so you will have to keep that in mind.
There are 11 total Loomis Tapes to find across the first prologue and first first chapters, which are recordings by Dr. Loomis, the one tracking down Michael Myers in the game. There are three other random recordings by other characters in the last two chapters as well, giving chapter four three total tapes to find. Collecting these allows you to listen to them in the game’s main menu and adds some additional backstory and exposition to the game.
Escape the Killer
As mentioned before, the main event in the game is definitely the online multiplayer. The setup of online play is pretty simple, as you have the option to matchmake with others randomly or to create a private match that you can setup to play with friends online. As of the launch of the game, you have the option between four maps in the game, Haddonfield Heights, Orange Grove Estates, Haddonfield Town Center, and East Haddonfield. Each map is pretty different from one another, though the setup of having certain houses and building you can enter and such being petty consistent across all of them.
An online match is 20 minutes long and features up to five total players at a time, with four playing as civilians and one playing at Michael Myers. For anyone that has played Dead by Daylight or a similar game, you will see how it obviously maintains the killer vs. four survivors setup at the core, but the game is actually quite different in a lot of other areas. Not only do you have a Michael that plays very different and distinct to the Michael Myers character here, but the civilians play very differently in the sense of what their goals are.
Starting with Michael, the goal for him is to kill everyone obviously, but does that not just include the four live players in the match outside of Michael. There are also five residents in the town that Michael is aimed with killing, as well as three special targets in each match that you may recognize if you had played the single player already. For each of these, Michael has to find, stalk, and execute them to earn points.
On the flipside, the four civilian players have other avenues to victory that make it different from games like Dead By Daylight, where the objective is just to repair generators and escape. You can just try to hide out the entire time and survive to be victorious against Michael for the 20 minutes, but that is going to get pretty boring very quickly. Instead, you can go out and try to help residents escape the neighborhood before Michael can get to them. This also involves using phones around the map to call the cops that are supposed to make things harder for Michael. However, I noticed that the cops here don’t work that well and often are just fodder for Michael to take out instead, making that almost a useless tactic.
The goal here is to keep residents alive as best you can in hiding spots to prevent Michael from killing them and eventually open up escape routes for you to use and be victorious against him. It is technically possible to get Michael arrested, too, if your team really works together, which will likely require some form of voice chat. However, the person playing as Michael can also hear you, so you have to really be strategic to get around that.
I really appreciate how the two sides of playing as either Michael or a civilian are so different here. One you feel like a powerful monster that is trying to stalk his prey, while the other is insanely tense as you try your best to hide from him. You cannot kill Michael as a civilian, as you can only stall him temporarily, so you’re always on the run or hiding for the duration of the match. I remember finding a good hiding spot one time and just hearing gunshots outside of a nearby window and thinking Michael was going to find me, but somehow he kept moving, and I was able to survive and outlast him for the entire match that time.
Also playing into how each match goes is how players customize their own Michael or civilians. Michael is equipped at the start with Killer Sense and Shape Jump, while also being able to choose up to three other abilities like Blackout or Detection Pulse to equip. Not only that, but you can equip a number of different skins and starting weapons to Michael as well. Each civilian in the game has their own stats and signature traits, which you can then customize with custom loadouts that include not only cosmetic items like their appearance, but also their unlockable starting items and perk deck.
With how powerful Michael is in the game, perks help to even the odds a little for the civilians. By completing matches and getting perk points, you can earn Perk Points, which can then be used in the Graveyard in the game’s main menu to roll for random perk cards. Up to three perk cards can then be equipped to a character per match, which provide the civilian with passive stat boosts, utility boosts, and other survival advantages that depend on the perk itself. There are more than 50 perk cards available in the game, so there are plenty to collect and use. The majority of these give some sort of percentage boost or reduction in a certain category like health restoration or fear buildup, but there are some others like Survival Intuition that mark a random escape location on your map automatically.
Halloween: The Game also has multiple progression levels that can be increased both in multiplayer and single player. Player progression is broken down into Profile Level, Killer Level, Civilian Level, and Weapon Levels. Profile Level is the general XP earned throughout the game. Killer Level is earned specifically through the use of Michael in the game. Civilian Level is based on each specific Civilian character, so you can choose specific characters you really want to focus on using. Lastly is Weapon Level, which is specific to Michael by killing people with specific weapons. By leveling these different groups, you can earn new characters, new abilities for Michael to use, new starting items and cosmetics for civilians, as well as some other rewards.
With only the four maps and some general neighborhood-like aesthetics, there isn’t a lot in the game at this point that adds too much variety setting-wise. What does add variety, though, is how different each match can go depending on who you’re playing with and against, as well as the strategies employed by each of them and their loadouts. Across the numerous matches I played, it was pretty mixed on who won, so it’s not super unbalanced like I was first worried about with how powerful Michael can be.
One of my biggest complaints across both single player and multiplayer is really the stilted movement of the characters a lot of the time. It will sometimes feel decent, but a lot of the time the movement just feels off and will leave you prone to making mistakes. This is paired with the fact that the interactives do not always seem to work when a button is pressed or held down, forcing you to move around and redo it when standing a little differently. With how fast-paced and intense many moments in this game can be, you really need to be able to be precise, and that just isn’t always the case here.
The Verdict
As hard as it is to believe, Halloween: The Game is the first standalone console game for the series since the Atari 2600. You can definitely see the inspirations from some other horror-themed franchises out there, but the game does a good job of really honing in on its main villain with gameplay befitting of the character. The main flaw of the game right now is the fairly minimal amount of content to play overall and the often stilted movement, but Halloween: The Game is a good start that hopefully will be built on moving forward with future updates beyond the ones slated to come out in the near future, which includes a new map already.
Pros
- Story mode serves as a fun tutorial
- Unique gameplay to set itself apart from competitors
- Michael does not feel too unbalanced with civilians
- Playing as Michael is just plain fun
Cons
- Story mode could have been longer and focused on more than just first movie
- Stilted gameplay
- Limited content such as maps at launch
This website contains affiliate links. If you click a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. This helps support our work. Learn more on our affiliate page.
