Outbreak: The New Nightmare (Playstation 4)

Powah Dunk | September 7, 2020 | Review | No Comments

Outbreak: The New Nightmare is hoping to entice you in with claims of it being a call back to the good ol’ days of Survival Horror. Does it live up to the claim or is this the case of rule of rose tinted glasses?.

Outbreak: The New Nightmare puts you in the boots of 1 of several characters who have to survive a zombie outbreak. Story is told to you through text screens and then you are thrown into the mix, choosing a tutorial or not, giving you a console designed story to follow.

The story while standalone gave off the impression I either needed to read into the series or have played them before, it didn’t grab me at all but that didn’t bother me, I wasn’t here for the narrative.

Now what excited me about Outbreak was that on Steam this is advertised as a spiritual successor of a kind to the Resident Evil: Outbreak series, online survival horror, ch’yeah sign me up for that!.

After stumbling through what I can only describe as 90s PC menus or placeholders the true horror of the game revealed its self. The game on consoles has no online multiplayer, essentially rendering the biggest selling point for me null.

Instead what lay in wait was, to a point the classic survival horror experience, we had tank controls, clunky A.I, usual crap crippling combat.

Now I’m not going to totally crucify the game for the camera or control choices, it was in the description and was what I signed up for. Instead of charming and nostalgia inducing though I was left cold and annoyed more than anything.

The menus look and feel like total crap, cobbled together on paint. The game has zero art direction aside from copying every convention from other zombie horror games. The character models just awkwardly glide around the environments and animate about as well as the original Resident Evil titles did back on PsOne.

The frame rate is also a strange bird in this title, jumping around all over the place guaranteeing you’ll never have a smooth experience with it. The scenery and lighting does try and you can see what the developers wanted to do with it but unfortunately be it time or money just didn’t seem the stretch.

There are several modes in the game such as a survival mode around one of the games many maps. The game isn’t exactly short on content which does show the developers do care.

I really really really wanted to like anything about this title, personally speaking I’ve had the series on my Steam wishlist for a few months now. There are plenty of classic survival horror inspired titles either out or coming out, this was one that looked most inspiring. Stripping the online from this title was a giant death blow and the lack of optimization and core issues from U.I and charmless art direction leave this game as cold and as dead as the zombies that shuffle around its halls.