3.5/5 ★ – TheCriticalPandaBoi's review of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

So, I’ve been reviewing The Texas Chainsaw franchise recently and… well to be nice, it was definitely a journey to say the least. I wasn’t too fond of a majority of the movies but on the side, I was playing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre game! And if I’m honest, I was genuinely thinking about giving this a negative review, I really wasn’t enjoying this game at first, but I kept coming back to it with my friends and to be honest, it’s fun enough. At it’s best, it’s really fun but at it’s worst, it’s very god damn frustrating, since this is an asymmetrical game, you are gonna get those different emotions, especially if you’re someone who plays Dead by Daylight a lot, then you are definitely someone who shares that opinion with me. Granted, I’ve only played a total of 12 hours of the game, according to the PlayStation 5 time stamp thing so this is not a review from someone who has millions of hours and chair bound whilst playing this game, just thought I’d mention that, this is a review from a gamer who isn’t too competitive in the gaming scene. So, just like every asymmetrical game, there’s 2 different sides to it, there’s the Victims and then there’s the Family, in total, 7 players can play in a lobby, 4 victims and 3 family members and I do think that’s acceptable, nothing worth noting there. But each character have their own special abilities and some of them work very well and feel pretty balanced, while some tend to feel a little too overpowered and does kinda get annoying. Before I talk about the negatives, I do wanna talk positively and praise the game a bit because there’s a lot of different parts that I like. I do appreciate how they took a lot of original character approaches to the game, like the only 3 people who are from the movies are Leatherface, The Hitchhiker and The Cook, anybody else is an original character to the game which I do appreciate because of how aimless and inconsistent the lore is, so why not just add new characters, and they work well with the game as well!! The new family members are Johnny and Sissy, and if you wanna spend money on the game, there’s also Nancy and they all bring their own unique abilities and add a lot of spice to the gameplay. Leatherface obviously has a mother fucking chainsaw so that’s they’re ability, The Hitchhiker is able to place these bone traps and i actually don’t think that’s too overpowered considering the victims are able to destroy and disarm them with bone scraps, and then The Cook has the ability to hear the victims if they run around too much, which I also find quite balanced. Johnny is able to follow the victims footprints, I can’t say on whether that ability is good or not but my friend seems to love playing Johnny, especially shirtless Johnny, and she seems to see no problem with him, Sissy sprays poison gas into the air and blinds victims if they run into it. And Nancy, like I said, you have to pay for her, she’s able to have this weird sixth sense ability to see where a victim is, but, obviously for a balancing standpoint, you can’t really see very well while doing it, but she’s also able to place barbed wire on crawl spaces which will hurt victims when they crawl through it, and that’s definitely a better ability than the all foreseeing bullshit. The victims are where the abilities become a lot more foggy to me, since I have not played every victim in the game, I mostly play as Leland because he’s able to push over the family and I like to see them fall because it looks silly. But there is 2 victims you have to buy, Danny and Virginia, and when I tell you that Virginia’s ability is so fucking annoying, I’m not exaggerating, she has a similar ability to Sissy, except when you get blinded by it, you cannot see anything for a long ass time, and I had a game where this sweaty asshole just kept getting the ability and just blinding me with it over and over, and then some other jack ass stabs me with a bone shiv and I’m stunned while they bag me, it genuinely frustrates me. This game is also very unforgiving for a newcomer who just bought the game, I only know it’s not because i decided to buy it and play it 6 months after it fully released so everyone knows the gist of what to do. But back to the victim side, so there’s multiple different ways to escape the family, and each way requires a lot of sneaking around and looking for items to be able to open a door and run out and, you know how an asymmetrical game works. If you get caught by a family member, you’re able to crawl through gaps in the walls, you are able to crouch in bushes to hide away and if you are getting hunted down, you can just almost commit not living and jump down a well, and I do like all the different alternatives and even consequences to taking the well too, since you lose health and take fall damage. It’s also very satisfying once you escape, simply because of how painfully long it takes to actually be able to escape, you can definitely speed run it, like there’s an achievement to escape in under 5 minutes so it’s very possible, me and my friends even had someone escape in 3 minutes of the match starting, but since I’m a relatively new player, it’s satisfying to escape. I do think I prefer playing as the family than I do the victims personally, and yes, it’s because I’m a Leatherface main and I got me my mother fucking chainsaw. You also have cosmetic items to that you can obtain, some you can get for free by playing a certain amount of games as a specific character or if you get those heavy pay checks then you can spend real money on cosmetic items. There’s also some purchasable executions that you can buy and no I did not buy any of them executions because I’m not good enough at the game for that. But now we get into the damn negatives of this game, because there’s a lot of factors that really god damn annoy me. The poxy map layouts are overly complicated and too big, in the basement, it’s really damn easy to get lost down there, and then once you finally get out of the basement, you are left trying to find where the exits are and the requirements all on your own. It wouldn’t be as frustrating if the game helped you out and told you the objectives and the exit areas instead of needing to find it yourself, even if it’s momentarily, it’d be nice to know where the hell I’m going instead of wondering around aimlessly. I don’t know if I’m able to speak for everyone about that aspect because again, there’s victims I played against that know very well what they’re doing and where everything is so it’s probably the case where I have to play millions of hours or something but I don’t have that kind of time bro. A little bit of a pet peeve is messy skill trees too, and I don’t like the skill tree at all in the game, there’s a skill tree for every character and it feels overwhelmingly messy and all over the place, it’s not Assassin’s Creed Valhalla level messy, or come to think of it, Ubisoft level messy in general, but it’s just quite weird looking to me. This isn’t to do with the game, this is more the player base but those players are toxic as shit, me and my friends literally had someone wishing death upon another player in the game text chat because they wanted to play Virginia, hell, just yesterday I had a Julie constantly stabbing me in the ass and pissing me off 😂and then she’s TBAG because she was being a twat. But toxic player bases live rent free in any game ever, I’m a Dead by Daylight player and my friends have heard me many times lose my shit every now and again, it’s just natural I guess, and to people who don’t get pissed off, well, you are the best example of gamers not wanting to commit murder or grand theft autos in real life. Overall, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Game is a pretty fun game at times, it’s bordering on a 3 star rating but it’s currently 3.5 because friends make it more enjoyable, but things can be subject to change if I had to be honest!!