The Blackout Club – Review (PS4)
The Blackout Club is an ambitious new title from developer Question featuring veterans that worked on both Bioshock and Dishonored. With that kind of talent behind the game it’s easy to have high expectations from this first person co op horror game. So how does it live up? Simply put, it’s really is a mixed bag.
The prologue will give you a partial idea of what’s going on. It’s clear that the developers are fans of Stranger Things and are trying to strike while that iron is hot. Things are not as they seem in the small town where you live. At night the darkness brings out a terrible monster known only as The Shape. After a conversation with her parents the character in the prologue decides to explore the town for herself while her friends were at the hideout waiting for her, she is attacked by The Shape and disappears.
This is where you come in. After a fairly weak character creation you’ll join up to three other friends on various missions as you try to uncover what is actually going on in your town.
When they say that The Blackout Club is a co-op game, that’s exactly what they mean. This game is nearly impossible on your own even on the easiest setting. You and your gang start out in an old rail car where you’ll choose your gear and head out on missions. The setting is eerie and will keep you on edge at all times. Your stamina is your life gauge here and, though most of the game involves you sneaking around, you’ll want to save your stamina for when you really need to run. Any altercation with the mysterious adults that are trying to catch you will result in a permanent loss of stamina until you completely run out and have to restart the mission. You can revive your teammates but in the heat of it all that becomes increasingly difficult.
The mysterious figures, for the most part, cannot see you so sneaking around will keep you safe in theory, but they still seem to find and locate you even when you’re being completely still and quiet. This game is mercilessly hard and not in a good way. It feels overly difficult for no reason. Drones that keep watch from the sky can locate you, but those are surprisingly easy to get away from while the creatures that can’t see can locate you at a moment’s notice. Once things really get intense and you start fumbling around trying to get away from them it is game over.
Adding to the horror is an advanced option that will allow the game to listen to the conversations you’re having with you friends and use your own words in the game against you. This is a trick haunted houses have been using for quite some time and it is, in fact, terrifying.
Missions, on the other hand, feel completely bland and nonsensical. For example, in one level you’ll be looking for fire underground, surrounded by the mysterious shadows in an attempt to take the fire outside and place it in a garbage can. This is the type of mission you’ll be going thorough in order to find your lost friend and figure out exactly why you’re waking up every morning unaware of what happened the night before. By the time you actually find out what is happening you’ll be so frustrated that you almost won’t even care. This is a shame because with the talent behind this game it should have been so much stronger. Bioshock and Dishonored have some of the best mission structures in video game history, making this even more frustrating.
Gameplay is mostly stealth related. You’ll be crouching through the levels in hopes that the bad guys won’t hear you and attack. Closing your eyes will both lead you on the path that you should be on and also show you if The Shape is nearby. You can use the various items that you take with you to kill or debilitate your foes, but they don’t always work well. The taser can only be used at certain times and when you’re at seemingly certain angles. Other weapons like the crossbow only have one bolt, making it completely useless after your first shot. There are item drops around the map, but often they take a lock pick that you won’t have. Because of this, you’ll need to bust it open, causing the enemies to swarm you and causing you to fail the level.
Recommendation: The Blackout Club is frustrating on so many levels. Unless you’re playing the game co-op, don’t even bother… you’ll never make it through the missions. There was so much potential and, with patches, the difficulty could become a little more balanced in time. As it stands now the difficulty and strange mission structures keep the game from really being all that fun.
*The Blackout Club was provided to the reviewer by the publishing company but this fact did not alter the reviewer’s opinion*
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
