Microsoft hasn’t been spending half as much time promoting games for the Xbox One as they’ve been coming up with new names to annex onto the “One” at the end of “Xbox One”, but they did take out a few minutes to put together a tweet recently to let gamers know that Drop Dead Studios’ Outbreak: The New Nightmare is currently available for the Xbox One.
The game originally entered into Early Access back in June of 2017 for PC. The game offers both classic and new-school designs through a fixed-camera campaign mode, an onslaught survival mode, and an experimental bonus game mode.
The game sports four-player online cooperative play with built-in voice support. You can also play the game offline in single-player mode as well. You can check out the trailer below to see what Outbreak is like in action.
I can only imagine how difficult it must be trying to play the game with up to four people via a fixed-camera view.
Apart from the 1997-style “cinematic” camera angles, the game also has several playable characters, old-school inventory management, and semi-random enemy placements and spawn-ins.
You can also upgrade and customize your characters, along with make use of certain destructible elements within the environment to help aid you during combat.
Visually, the game looks pretty good. The lighting is on point and the material layers are designed quite well to make the hallways, alleyways, buildings and poorly illuminated rooms look haunting and terrifying. The dynamic light emission across the walls and streets from the flashlights creates eerie glows and properly reflected light sourcing, all geared to creating that classic horror-survival feeling.
However, beyond the visual presentation, the actual animations, combat and character movements are stiff, clunky and cumbersome looking.
My prima facie observations weren’t isolated. Various users over on the Steam user review section pointed out similar flaws in the actual game, citing that the controls are difficult and unwieldy, while the animations are bland, the feedback during combat is poorly implemented, and the character movement isn’t synched right to the animations.
Even though Drop Dead Studios has plans on graduating from Early Access later this month, it sounds like they should spend a few more months overhauling the animations and making some much needed gameplay tweaks before releasing it in full.
Alternatively, the game is already available over on the Xbox Store for $8.99. However, it might be best to wait for a patching overhaul before diving into the game.
[Update: According to the developers, the Xbox One version is a single-player only outing, but the Steam version supports four-player co-op.]
