Where we had “Evil Dead: The Game” last year, another iconic horror IP is set to toss its name into the ever-growing ring.

Sumo Digital and Gun Media are combining to release “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” on Aug. 18. As recently as a month ago, a technical test lasting roughly a week took place. PC players had the chance to play the game, and many more could finally see official gameplay.

Today’s piece will aim to provide some thoughts on the technical test, offer some suggestions that could help make the game better and, finally, forecast how it will do once it finally hits shelves.

Gameplay

Uniquely, Texas Chain Saw Massacre features three players as “The Family” who will hunt down four players as “The Victims.” The Victims spawn inside of The Family’s basement, and their objective is to locate one of numerous exits to live another day. The Family, simply put, want to kill The Victims at any and all costs.

It should be clarified that, unlike Dead by Daylight and Evil Dead: The Game, Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not an asymmetrical game. All players on both sides play the game from a third person perspective.

Games which occupy the progressively prevalent “killer vs survivor” niche, namely Dead by Daylight and Evil Dead: The Game, only have one “killer” player. This already allows Texas Chain Saw Massacre to stand out, as you can grab a buddy or two to join you in your pursuit to butcher the opposition. Predictably, it also makes the act of hunting “survivors” a team-oriented exercise, and you will be relying on your teammates to some extent.

Interestingly, despite the fact that this game has four “survivors” just like the aforementioned horror games, teamwork is a lot less important for The Victims in this game. While the game can get bleak in a hurry when three of four Victims have been killed or escaped, you typically aren’t directly aiding your teammates in the same way. You can heal other Survivors, you can use voice communications to help each other out, and you can ‘help’ fellow Victims in chase if you so choose. But there are no hook saves like DbD and you aren’t attempting to essentially capture a stronghold like in Evil Dead. You can very easily play this game with “randoms,” and it is much easier to tolerate incompetent survivor teammates here.

Finally, interactions between the two sides have virtually endless variables, but work off of a fairly simple gameplay system. Each of the three Family members operate very differently from one another, with their own unique powers, mechanics and statistics. For example, only The Hitchhiker can follow Victims through tight spots, like a crack in the wall, and only Leatherface can destroy obstacles that the Victims could otherwise make use of to escape. Meanwhile, on the Victims’ end, Connie can pick locks and open boxes much faster, while Leland can fare much better in chase, as he can stun The Family briefly and has more stamina than his peers to work with.

Overall, core gameplay looks slightly bland at the moment, but help is on the way: the showcased Technical Test did not offer participants the ability to use “perks,” which could enhance the game significantly. With or without perks, gameplay looks like it’s functional enough, but nothing we haven’t seen in spades from the game’s competition.

Balance

Unfortunately, this game has some pretty enormous issues with balance. The Cook, one of three Family members, is notoriously weak and very unfun to play when the player behind him cannot communicate with their teammates. This is because he fares very poorly in chase, while his strength is meant to be tracking and locating Victims. If not on communications, his tracking is null and void, as the other two players are not given the same information The Cook is, meaning the player would have to relay this to them.

Apart from character-specific issues, the technical test unveiled issues with balance that threaten to make the game incredibly unfun under the right circumstances. In particular, there is one mechanic Victims can use to better escape the Family — slamming doors in their face. If timed correctly, this will stun The Family and give the Victim who did it the opportunity to get away. The problem is, the stun this incurs is so long that it is very easy for the Victim to simply stand there and continuously slam the door on The Family over and over again — if done correctly, you can stun The Family indefinitely barring a third player coming in to interrupt the process.

Regardless of how “balanced” something may or may not be, it is extremely antithetical for a player to simply not be able to play the game because of a mechanic. As such, door slams need a look- something as simple as making repeat stuns work less efficiently would suffice. As well, creating major mechanics, perks or characters which rely on voice communication, such as The Cook, is going to be very unappealing for the average player.

Wishlisting

Now that we’ve had a brief look at how the game plays out, let’s get together a brief “wishlist” of sorts that projects to make the game better:

• Grandpa should be made more impactful than he currently is. He doesn’t make a noticeable difference on the game until he’s been brought all the way to level 5, which takes a ton of time for The Family to achieve and generally isn’t worthwhile.
• Leatherface and The Hitchhiker should be given a visual cue of some kind that The Cook has found a Victim with his power. Something as simple as a small pop up saying “The Cook has located a Victim” would suffice. This way, The Cook’s power isn’t entirely reliant on voice communications, but it maintains the fairness of not basically giving his power to the others. They will know that he has found someone, and putting 2 and 2 together, they can follow him to find their prey. But they won’t be simply given the same information The Cook has for free.
• Connie Taylor, one of the Victims, needs to be nerfed. As is, it is possible for her to escape The Family in less than one minute and 20 seconds. For reference, it takes The Hitchhiker longer to actually seal off multiple escape routes than it does for Connie to reach them, which can make it straight up impossible to stop her from escaping if she’s in the right hands. A simple solution could be making it take longer for her to pick locks and open boxes, in exchange for building up the noise level on her actions less. This way, she could be meaningfully different and useful from the others without straight up outclassing them.
• In general, The Victims should make less noise. Not from taking actions, but from their characters randomly talking to themselves, which can unfairly and errantly give away their position to The Family. Balance notwithstanding, it’s also just generally annoying hearing characters complain about something every ten seconds.

Conclusion

In the world of today, Dead by Daylight is still going strong, while Evil Dead has seen better days. Neither of those positions are terribly surprising. DbD has a theoretically unlimited amount of IPs it can branch out to, bringing fanbases over in the process to keep the game alive. For example, when acquiring the “Resident Evil” IP for the first time, the game saw a massive uptick in its playerbase despite being out for over half a decade. Juxtaposed to Evil Dead, a video game with one very limited IP and lacking the ability to expand, it’s hardly surprising Evil Dead was a mostly fleeting video game.

Unfortunately, similarly to Evil Dead, Texas Chain Saw Massacre will probably have a good playerbase at the start, fall off before long and, in about a year’s time, be more or less finished. We’ve seen this happen to Friday the 13th, we’ve seen it happen to Evil Dead, and there’s little to suggest Texas Chain Saw Massacre will have it different.

Having said that, the game itself looks functional, there are still perks expected to enhance the game for all sides, and it offers the unique niche of giving multiple players to the ‘killer’ side, which is notable. It will probably be, if still technologically sound with no serious errors, about a B- to B+ type game. It does indeed do something different in a significant way, but core gameplay has been done to death – literally, and this game will be out of the public eye not too long after 2024 rolls over, assuming it even makes it to the new year.