Outbreak: Endless Nightmares

‎It errs on the side of being a bit simple and content, it shows in its technical section and it shows even more in its playable section. But I stress it again, it's not a bad title, but it's a long way from being a high-quality game.‎

Outbreak: Endless Nightmares is just a bad game. Everything from the awful controls, terrible pseudo-randomised level design, a paper-thin story that I can tell you nothing about, all make for a horrible experience. Then mix in needless roguelike elements that just don’t belong in a Resident Evil style title. It’s a recipe made in hell.

Outbreak: Endless Nightmares is not only an insultingly bad roguelike; it’s an insulting and borderline plagiarized emulation of games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The idea of a survival horror roguelike is very solid, but this game exists as an example of what happens when good ideas fall into the wrong hands. I understand that Dead Drop Studios are a small team, and their love for the genre is clear. But Endless Nightmares is the kind of game that gives small-budget indie horror/survival titles a bad rap in the gaming community. With shoddy controls, uninspired environments, frustrating gameplay design, and tedious systems, the only scary thing about Outbreak: Endless Nightmares is the act of playing the game itself.

For as much as that sense of nostalgia is great, video games have come a long way since then and I’ve become accustomed to a certain playstyle. Being so fully integrated back into an old style of game, as I said earlier, reminds me of why I’m thankful for how far games have come. Outbreak: Endless Nights does everything it sets out to and while I enjoyed some dungeon crawling and shooting zombies in the face for a little while, I’m still going to go back to my very full game library… I have far too much to catch up on to spend too much time in 2002.

Having endured a previous Outbreak title in the form of Epidemic, I'll say my enthusiasm for checking out Endless Nightmares was limited...

I spent two hours playing Outbreak: Endless Nightmares, which was more than enough to know it wouldn’t get better. This game fails at being a roguelike and survival horror with its terrible systems, controls, and asset flipped layouts, but that’s only the summarized version of this awful experience. The endless nightmares of Outbreak come from knowing you wasted any amount of time from your life playing it.