Dead by Daylight Review

After releasing last year on PC, Dead by Daylight is finally making its way to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Is the game worth checking out, or is it a day late and a dollar short? Check out or Dead by Daylight review and make your choice.

Dead By Daylight Review

Dead by Daylight is a pretty simple concept that works fairly well. You play as either the killer or the survivors. As a killer, you have to kill the survivors. As a survivor, you have to escape before the killer gets you. Sounds simple, right? Well, the actual gameplay can get a bit more tricky. Survivors have to repair five generators and open a large metal door to escape. They have to do this while a player, whose only goal is to kill, is hunting them down like defenseless animals. It isn’t easy for the killer either though. He has to hang them on hooks and wait for the sky to open up and accept them as a sacrifice. While he is doing this, the survivors are free to roam, or they can attempt to help their downed ally. It is an advanced game of cat and mouse that feels really good when you win. It is also worth noting that this game online only, as there are no single player modes available.

There are currently six killers you can play as: The Trapper, the Hillbilly, the Wraith, the Doctor, the Nurse, and the Hag. Each one plays differently from the last, but all of them can bring you down in a couple hits. There really is a style here for everyone. For a more direct player, you can use the Hillbilly and his one-shot knockdown chainsaw. For stealthy players, you can try out the Wraith or Nurse, who can get to players before they even know what is happening. And for those who prefer to strike terror at a distance, the Trapper, Doctor, and Hag all inflict punishment while you are away. Odds are you won’t like every killer, but you will find one that you really enjoy. Some are more tricky to use than others, so learning them really helps on both sides of the field.

As for survivors, you don’t really have a skill or anything else unique. They all bear different outfits and appearances, but their base actions are all the same. Where things change up is on the items they can find. Survivors can find medkits, repair kits, a flashlight, and a skeleton key. The medkit heals, as I am sure you could have guessed. The repair kit helps repair generators quicker or take down the sacrifice hooks the killer uses. The flashlight can stun the killer if you hit them in the eyes. The skeleton key is the rarest item, and it unlocks a hidden hatch in the level that will let you escape without using the generators. Killing the killer as a survivor is not possible, but stunning them or escaping is. While taking the role of the survivors, you can play solo or group up with friends.

Let me break down how a typical match goes. Survivors normally try to group up with one other person, because this makes repairing the generators quicker. One of them inevitably messes up and this makes a large boom, alerting the killer to their presence. The killer then comes over and starts chasing one of the survivors. Here is where the game can go good or bad, depending on which side you are on. A good survivor can keep a killer at bay for five minutes, letting the other survivors repair most of the generators in that time. They can use windowsills and pallets to slow down the killer and escape, buying teammates more time. On the other hand, a good killer will note this and set up traps or predict where a survivor will run, and cut that time down quite a bit. Once they put a player on a hook, the pressure mounts to the survivors and they normally start making more mistakes. It is a lot of mind games and when you are good at it, you feel good.

Now the big thing that will change between each match is the map and the builds. Both survivors and killers get a skill tree that is completely random for each individual for the most part. These trees consist of add-ons, traits, and offerings. Add-ons boost items for survivors, such as additional charges to a repair kit letting you break more hooks. They also boost the killer’s abilities, such as making traps blend in better. These disappear after each match, but you unlock them very quickly. Traits are permanent and give you fairly good boosts. Some of them help you avoid the killer and find the survivors, some gain you more XP, and others reduce skill checks. Not all of them are great, but getting a good one is a game changer. The offerings disappear after a match as well and they can also increase XP or give you a high chance of getting a certain map.

The map design in Dead by Daylight is pretty good. It does seem balanced more towards one side, but that depends on which killer is being played. For instance, on the farm level, it is easy for a killer to lose the survivors in the large corn fields. They are shorter than the stalks and move quickly, making the limited vision an asset to the survivors. However, a trapper can place traps in the field and the survivors will have a hard time seeing those, making it the perfect killing ground. Another map, the asylum, is an indoor map with a lot of doorways, walls, and windowsills for survivors to use to their advantage. The Nurse Or Hag can warp through walls though, making these less of an asset to survivors and more of a detriment. So luck plays a bit of a role here because you really have no way of knowing which killer you are facing until you see them in a match.

I did run into a few funky bugs while playing, but no hard crashes. The first bug I ran into happened as I was playing a killer. Someone dropped a pallet on me, and when I recovered my controls were inverted and I couldn’t fix them until I restarted the game. I read online that this happened to people playing as survivors as well – it wasn’t game breaking, but man it was annoying. The other bug was when I was a survivor. When you get picked up by a killer as a survivor, you can wiggle yourself free if you fill up a bar. I didn’t have that option as one of the survivors and it really did mess quite a bit with the gameplay. It worked fine on the other survivors, but not on ace. I’m not sure if this one was a bug or if people weren’t playing survivors much, but as a killer, I had to restart my game a couple times during matchmaking because no one would pop up. After I restarted I got matches quickly, it was just a bit odd.

Dead by Daylight is a good game for playing solo or with friends. If you prefer a multiplayer game where you have to think as opposed to just shooting someone in the face, check it out.