Killer Klowns from Outer Space: The Game Review

I awaken in a neon-lit metropolis, the roads littered with hastily abandoned cars. I stumble across pools of blood and clumps of cotton candy, watchi🐼ng as other confused souls pilfer through cooler boxes and old dusty lockers. I’m not sure who left behind this carnival of a crime scene, but my guard is up, so I grab the nearest pipe and carefully make my way towards the bridge, hoping I can escape this strange nightmare. But as I find myse💟lf edging closer towards the gate, ready to unlatch the padlock, I hear the squeaking of clown boots on tarmac.

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Killer Klowns from O🀅u🌜ter Space: The Game is based on the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:one-off c🔜ult classic ‘80s slasher of the same name in which alien jesters descend in circus UFOs to harvest humans in their cotton candy machines, turning them into little pierrot minions. While it might seem like an incredibly obscure choice for a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dead by Daylight-style adaptation, ♑it’s the pe🔯rfect foundation for an asymmetrical horror game.

Developer IllFonic doesn’t shy away from its DBD inspirations, but it uses the Klowns backdrop to expand on them—literally. Instead of four survivors fending off one killer, there are seven survivors trying to outwit three klowns. But where oth♔er games in the genre see you helplessly hiding in the shadows, sneaking around as you try to escape, Klowns gives you a fighting chance.

three Killer Klowns standing in a carnival

You𓃲 can find shotguns, revolvers, baseball bats, and frying pans littered across each map which can be used to take the fight directly to the klowns (who are killed by popping their nose). It means that you have to approach being a klown far more tactically. Separating survivors from the pack beco𓂃mes as important as hunting them down, adding an entirely new layer to the cat-and-mouse game, lest you risk being killed yourself.

But as killers to the humans’ survivors, klowns obviously aren’t helpless. With interchangeable abilities, you can track down humans, lay traps, chase them in invisible cars, and teleport across the map to get the jump on them mid-chase. Synergising these different abilities with your teammates is paramount if 🌃you don’💟t want to be ganged up on, which makes the killer side of the asymmetrical horror feel as collaborative as the survivor side, a first for the genre.

Klowns keeps the iconic DBD hook mechanic, but it’s far less tedious as you don’t have to keep doing it over and over again to finally cinch a kill. You can either murder a human outright with your secondary weapon and perform the equivalent of a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mortal Kombat fatality, or you can zap them with your ray gun and stick them in a cotton candy cocoon which suffocates them to death almost immediately🌠 unless they have a sharp object to break out.

Klowntalities can be performed on downed survivors, triggering cutscenes that feel ripped right from the '80s film. You can pie people to death or just smack them in the nuts with a hammer.

There’s no needless back-and-forth that drags out matches, taking a note from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:last year🎃’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre game. Being a killer is far less enjoyable if you’re stuck in the same grind of hooking people up several times, chasing them again and again iꦚn a Groundhog Day of torture.

Survivors pointing a gun at a Killer Klown tank

Klowns ins♊tead blends the two approaches together, rewarding you for stringing up survivors by reducing the timer and speeding up the Klownpocalypse—which kills everyone when triggered—and by giving you minions who will alert you to a survivor’s presence. Beating them to death with a mace is more efficient, but has less benefits in the long run, creating a couple of interesting ways to play that add new, fresh layers to every match.

You can either be a murder hobo and clobber every♑one over the head, or you carefully work your way to annihilation. ꦜJuggling (haha) the two approaches keeps things from going stale, even after playing tens of matches back-to-back.

I was a little wary going in knowing that there were so many survivors in play, because the risk is that once you die, you’re left sitting around waitin⭕g for the match to end as six other people get to have all the f♏un.

Thankfully, survivors can be resurrected once per match, and when you’re for realsies dead, you can play minigames to drop ꦬitems to your🤡 teammates. This usually just means handing them a tennis ball to pitifully lob at a klown, but you can get lucky and gift knives to those stranded in cocoons or even shotguns to those in the midst of a chase.

Survivors crowded around a Killer Klown, holding knife and shotgun

The only major area Klowns falters in is its loot pool. There’s no rhyme or reason to where you find items. B📖urgers are in lockers and revolvers are in coolers, and you’ll often just find these storage boxes completely empty. It can make finding pivotal items used in escape strategies—like spark plugs and keys—a chore, since you’re running around the map like a headless chicken praying you won’t find your tenth stamina-boosting ic𓆏e lolly.

It also makes it much harder to plan out a defense as a klown, since a survivor could get lucky and find a spark plug and some fuel right by the boat at the docks and escape in minutes. Predetermined loot would remove♒ some of the challenge, but the lack of 🐠logic as to where things are found adds tedium and disrupts the balance for both sides.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space is one of the best asymmetrical horror games so far, standing side-by-side with the likes of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It’ll be interesting to see if i💎t fares better under the enormous shadow of Dead by Daylight than Sumo Digital’s efforts, but it’s stepping out of the gate with some interesting concepts that reinvent the way the genre plays, making survivors more formidable and killers m🌃ore tactical, encouraging teamwork and adding so much more depth to each match.