Have you ever seen a horror movie and thought you could be a better survivor and outwit your enemies? Tired of seeing a horror movie where the monster loses because somehow it failed to kill the humans? In Dead by Daylight, you can you prove your prowess and become the killer or survivors! Try to escape by cooperating with team members as the survivors all while dodging and avoiding the killer. Or you could always become the killer and try to maim the humans and stop them from trying to escape. The choice is yours in Dead by Daylight.

In Dead by Daylight, players choose either to be ordinary humans who are trying to avoid death by escaping or becoming the killer which means your job is to kill all the humans by making them sacrifices. Each role has different objectives and different means of accomplishing them. As the killer, you can choose one of several different beings to give you different powers/perks. If you choose to be a human, you must restart generators and open a pathway to the exit all the while avoiding the monster by hiding or running. With different maps and different characters to use, each match of Dead by Daylight feels different and keeps the players—whether you’re the killer or human—constantly on your toes. Heart pounding and hectic, Dead by Daylight will make you feel as if you’re the star of your own horror movie.

Dead by Daylight tells the tale of a being called The Entity. This evil force takes those who are evil and disturbed and transports them into another world to become powerful and monstrous killers. Meanwhile ordinary humans will enter this world if their luck causes them to wander too close to the last place the person who became a killer was taken from. The poor souls who find themselves in this otherworldly dimension must constantly survive against the various killers The Entity has created and are doomed to escape, survivor and die repeatedly in a seemingly endless cycle. Equally, the killers must hunt the humans to use their blood as sacrifices for The Entity. Choose your fate to be either the human or the killer in Dead by Daylight.

Here at Honey’s Anime, we don’t just watch anime and play games; we watch movies. Though it’s easy to say one of our favorite genres of film would have to be horror. The constant feeling of fear and tension make the hairs on your neck and arms stand tall and when the monster or killer appears we jump in fear but smile nonetheless. Horror movies are amazing, but often we always wanted a horror game that reminded us of our favorite slasher/killer films. That’s why one look at developer Behaviour Interactive’s Dead by Daylight and we knew we needed to play it and review it. Here are our thoughts on this unique survival horror multiplayer experience.

Dead by Daylight tasks players with either killing or surviving which seems quite simple in theory. However, upon starting up a few games of Dead by Daylight you’ll realize that developer Beaviour Interactive wanted to make this a truly multiplayer focused title. Surviving and killing don’t become just simple goals but actually feels competitive in nature. You’ll feel driven to kill off all the humans as a killer and as a human you’re going to want to escape with your friends/team. It’s actually a surprise that this works so well but it does cause Dead by Daylight to suffer in some regards which we will talk about near the end of our review for now let us focus on the gameplay.

As humans, Dead by Daylight is a third person survival game. You’ll run and hide to survive and you’ll have the objective to escape by any means necessary. This boils down to finding either generators to activate or finding other means of escape, though the latter is a rare option. While the killer is unable to be defeated, players can use various tools and traps to impede its movement. There’s almost a meta game on how players can survive, will they act as bait while team members do the objectives or will they act like loners and look out for themselves. If you’re playing with random players this can make every game of Dead by Daylight fun and exciting but with friends it becomes more team work orientated which actually can become tedious. This is one of the rare times we’ll say playing with random people online in a game actually might be more exciting than playing with people you know.

Now if you should choose the killer, Dead by Daylight becomes a first-person title. Your goal is simple, kill every human and prevent them from escaping. Similar to the humans, killers in Dead by Daylight have many means of accomplishing this task but in this case, it more so depends on the killer you choose. There are several killer classes—such as The Nurse, The Hag and The Doctor—and each has different means of killing and stalking the other players. Take for example the default class The Wraith, this killer can become cloaked and hide from the players. A smart player can use this set of abilities to lore in others and make them assume everything is safe then appear from behind and attack. Though it is important to mention that killers must put the humans onto meat hooks to truly kill them, though there are various weapons that can be obtained way later in the game that act as one hit kill weapons.

Now regardless of which side you choose in Dead by Daylight, there are several rather large issues that need to be mentioned. Controls are one of our biggest issues with Dead by Daylight. While humans handle fine, killers can feel—at times—clunky and hard to maneuver. While some might claim this is done intentionally—which could be a possibility—we feel most likely it wasn’t. Another issue we have is the very poorly explained concepts in Dead by Daylight. Everything from the controls to various in game mechanics feel more reliant on revelations than actually learning them. It won’t take a player forever to learn all of Dead by Daylight’s mechanics but it will turn some off initially when they die as a human because they didn’t know how to properly heal.

Graphically, Dead by Daylight also suffers a bit. In terms of character models and designs, we here at Honey’s Anime were thoroughly pleased. Characters feel similar to movie ideas but in a good way and there’s even some DLC for two new killers/humans one of which comes from the extremely popular and loved Halloween series. Though what we felt did suffer a bit was Dead by Daylight’s environments which felt a bit cliché. Sure, Dead by Daylight clearly wants players to feel as if they’re in a horror movie but some distinctive designs would have been appreciated. However, we say this more as our own thoughts and that might not be an issue with others. Though we do praise the audio as they can be downright terrifying at times…seriously The Doctor is disturbing sound wise and same can be said of the others.

Let us wrap up our review of Dead by Daylight by saying this. While Dead by Daylight has several rather large issues, it by no means is a bad game. We put in some time into Dead by Daylight and only rarely ever got annoyed or frustrated because the game did something to us. In a typical round of Dead by Daylight if we lost—either as humans or killers—we realized what we could have done differently and tried to incorporate that into the next game. Dead by Daylight works in the sense that it makes you want to keep playing and learn more for those who love games that harken to a self-learning style of play. We can honestly say we recommend Dead by Daylight to those who want a survival horror game with multiplayer focused gameplay. Those who don’t think that sounds too appealing may want to second guess picking up Dead by Daylight

Dead by Daylight is a fun and exciting multiplayer survival horror experience. Sure, Dead by Daylight has a slew of minor problems but it does more right then wrong we feel. Your mileage of Dead by Daylight will be based on how much you like horror movies and if you have ever wanted a game that tries its hardest to emulate that experience. Now then folks we have spent some time talking about Dead by Daylight but we want to open the floor to you all. Let us know in the comments if we convinced you to pick up Dead by Daylight or maybe made you think twice. As always if you love our reviews here at Honey’s Anime we have plenty more on our site so stick around and check them out.