The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Game Review

ign.com:

Perhaps as an ode to the horror movie genre itself, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre starts out with all the same joy and promise of a group of friends preparing for a weekend at a cabin in the woods before things quickly take a turn for the worse. While I definitely enjoyed plenty of my 20 hours with this novel take on the asymmetrical multiplayer blueprint, where three powerful murderers hunt down a team of four elusive teens, getting started wasn’t as smooth as it is in similar games and there’s less to do than expected once you’re up and running. Between that and some seriously frustrating technical issues, there was definitely a chloroform-doused wet blanket over the whole thing.

If you’ve played any asymmetrical horror game, be that Dead By Daylight or Friday the 13th, Evil Dead or Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed (among others), then you’ve already got a pretty good idea how developer Gun Interactive’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre works, to the point where it feels extremely familiar at first, right down to borrowed ideas like quicktime events and minigames to do things like turn on generators and pick locks, and hiding from baddies who can’t be killed.

But it also includes some important distinctions that help separate it (at least a little bit) from its peers, the biggest of which is that instead of a group of survivors running from one psychopath, there’s a whole team of psychopaths working together to entrap and eliminate their high school-aged quarry. It’s still lopsided at three killers vs four victims, but that adjustment has pretty substantial implications on the asymmetrical horror recipe, since now both sides require communication and teamwork to achieve victory. In other games, it can certainly feel unfair