Outbreak: Deluxe Edition

Surprisingly well-designed with a balance between inventory management, level-wide planning and on-the-fly judgement calls. You don't buy this for the story. For an indie title over USD 10.00 there's enough here to keep you playing longer than you think. Multiplayer was not tested at time of review.

An attempt at resurrecting the horror genre from a top-down perspective that has gone horribly awry. Terrible controls, frustrating visual effects and limp action result in Outbreak being a barely functional game.

Outbreak is a small survival horror that tries to deliver an intense co-op experience. The result is quite decent, though it seems that the structure of the game is quite rigid, especially if you look at the combat and movement systems. However, if you like traditional survival games, and if you have a couple of friend to play with, you can think about grab this one.

That said, Outbreak is worth a few hours of your time on a weekend, but, for me, not enough to convince me to spend a lot more time online in the community coming back weekend after weekend.

Outbreak doesn’t lend you a hand at all. When you’ve spent over half of an hour on a level with no checkpoints, it feels unfair that you’ll have to start all over again because you couldn’t get through the menu.

Outbreak's outward appearance of a survival horror game is inadvertently inaccurate. The traditional tropes are there, but the conventional style of gameplay that we associate with survival horror has been tampered with. Outbreak requires you to build your “perfect run” strategy for each level rather than taking it slow and steady. This isn't what I expected, and isn't all that bad, but delivers a completely different style of gameplay than initial impressions would have you believe.