Outbreak: The New Nightmare

It’s impossible to recommend this game, or even this series, when it gets a new low-quality entry every single year. No story, tense music or any decent action to speak of, this feels like a fan-fiction web browser game getting a yearly FIFA update. If you’re an ardent fan of survival horror games, then perhaps it’s worth following the incremental updates as it may eventually result in a decent release, but let me assure you, it’s not now and it’s not Outbreak: The New Nightmare.

Having just finished playing Outbreak: The New Nightmare a couple days ago, it’s almost impressive how forgettable it was; I had to keep going back to the game to remember what I saw and experienced, even after going through every Campaign and Experiments mission, each of which lasted anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half. Sadly, this has the look and feel of an incomplete Steam game, and I had to triple check the price for this because I couldn’t believe that it really is $13 on PS4. Given the short amount of time between most releases in the Outbreak series, I can only recommend that the developer spend much, much more time on each entry. That way, maybe the next one will play better and the visuals might not only look better, but consist of way fewer reused assets that didn’t look so good in the first place. I realize this will fall on deaf ears since Outbreak: Lost Hope, the fourth game in the series, will likely be out on PS4 by the time this review goes up. Maybe (or should I say, hopefully) the later releases are better, because this is priced way above what it’s actually worth.

I mean it when I say I wanted nothing more than to like Outbreak: The New Nightmare. As a massive fan of the games that inspired it, it seemed to me like Dead Drop Studios was poised to deliver something special. Unfortunately, the scariest thing about this game is just how unfinished it feels. From its rampant bugs and performance problems to its uninteresting main story, the game is so bad it borders on parody, making it all but impossible to recommend to even the most scare-starved survival horror fans. If you’re dying for something new to get your heart racing, you’re much better off picking up the recently released The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters or Infliction: Extended Cut.

There are some games out there that are "so-bad-its-good," like most of Swery's games. Outbreak: The New Nightmare is one of those "so-bad-it-gave-me-depression" ones. The developer likely is inexperienced, and working with almost no budget, but not everyone should make a game. The saying "anyone can make a game", means that a good game designer can come from anywhere. All survival-horror fans must stay away from this one.

Outbreak: The New Nightmare is only something that I think the most dedicated survival horror fans will enjoy and even then they should approach it with caution.

A brilliant idea stuffed into the decayed carcass and reanimated using a microwave. Avoid

With a proposal to revive the survival horror genre along the lines of games like Resident Evil, Outbreak: The New Nightmare bets on traditional elements of gameplay, plot and atmosphere of tension. However, by bringing the technical elements that are a fundamental and constitutive part of this type of game, it fails to promote an authentic experience that causes the famous sensations that enshrined the zombie apocalypse titles.

It’s a game made for survival horror fans, but sadly isn’t one I can see many survival horror fans loving.

The game does a really good job of conveying the gameplay and appearance of the original Resident Evil games, but the problem is, the world has moved on, and when the camera angles are so acute and obscured it makes what should be a nostalgic trip, very frustrating. The gunplay is overly sensitive and inconsistent as you never really know where you are shooting or you cannot judge distance and angles very well.

Nostalgia vs. Quality