Recent reviews by Someone in Particular

EDIT: I've kept the original review below for the sake of transparency, but the game has rapidly become much, much worse since said review was made, hence deciding to change the vote to negative.

The game itself rapidly ceases to be fun after you realize the the game-play consists of either staring at the screen waiting for a *ding* so you can do a """skill""" check, or running from window to window with little actual strategy once you get familiar with routing. This removes the horror entirely, making it a slog to play as survivor, unless you play Survive With Friends; don't worry, I'll get to that. Most killers are frustrating to play as a result as there is often very little they can do aside from run straight at the survivor hoping they fall asleep in the chase. The fire alarms strapped to their back (the "terror radius") makes it near impossible to get the drop on survivors either, further simplifying an already droll experience for both sides. Newer killers kind of get around this (primarily by taking a page out of Nurse's playbook and just being able to teleport around or ignoring other game-play mechanics), but you have to pay for these improvements, or treat the game like a job to "earn" the privilege of these new killers.

This is compounded by the Devs idea of "balance" and "patches", which loves giving survivors abilities which cannot be anticipated by the killer, requiring the killer to assume they may have any and all perks simultaneously, limiting their options even further. In contrast, almost all killer abilities might as well have a neon sign going "I HAVE THIS PERK" stapled to their head, making survivor gameplay even more flow-chart like (i.e. "Killer has Ruin, must find Ruin"). The game also remains rather buggy, and hackers can be still found as well; needless to say, your experience game to game can vary drastically depending on how stable the code decides to be.

This is made even worse with the Survive With Friends system, which allows the entire survivor team to effectively min-max their perk usage, effectively making it a 16 v 4 perk system. The devs also insist on balancing all perks (both survivor and killer) to be roughly equal, which does not match how this game is usually played (with survivors working together). I understand that players want to play with their friends, but there needs to be some consideration for the balance issues this creates, something the devs vehemently refuse to address. Like many competitive games, this also encourages toxicity, and this game in particular is in dire need of a ♥♥♥♥ fumigation, competing with the likes of Rainbow 6 and nearing Leage of Legends sometimes. Seriously, under-season your dinner if you're going to play this game, as many players have salt in abundance.

To be clear, it is not all doom and gloom. To their credit, they did fix the one "major" flaw I mentioned in the original review, making the matchmaking system no longer peer-to-peer. They also allowed for cross-platform play, and while the implementation of it is rather questionable, it remains a genuinely admirable development. They also have attempted to balance the game better over time (not very successfully in my opinion, but the effort is clearly there), and the art and graphics teams in particular knock it out of the park the majority of the time. The addition of the archives system is nice as well, providing sets of cosmetics that are earned more reasonably in game and encourage players to vary their play on both survivor and killers.

Unfortunately these benefits have been vastly overshadowed by the other changes made, in particular the move towards extreme nickle-and-dime pricing and slow-as-molasses progression. The abominable pricing of many of the cosmetics is particularly bad; one of the highest quality skins can cost you 15$, and there are dozens of them, plus many "simpler" ones as well which still run around 5$ each. While this is not as bad as something like a "loot box", this is still blatant greed on the devs part.

Of course, you can "earn" in-game currency to buy these by playing; shame it takes literally 100+ hours of optimal play to do this once for one skin on one of the nearly 70 characters in game! And if you want cosmetics for a licensed character, too bad; pony up peasant (to be fair, this is likely the license holder being greedy rather than the devs, but its still a consideration)! This is on top of the DLC they are selling for the killers and survivors, which cost 7$ each, roughly coming to a total game cost of ~170$ if you want every killer and survivor available to you. For context, Payday 2, a game notorious for its DLC, comes to about the same if you buy the DLC in its perpetually available bundles, and to boot you get nearly every cosmetic available in the game in the purchase! The recent change to how learned perks and prestige only compounds the problem, making progression even slower, especially for learned perks for DLCs which you don't own. You now have to buy the perk three times from the random lotto web (before it was once), and each purchase takes days of grind! They also removed the killers bonus Bloodpoint perk (not the survivors though!), making earning these things in-game even more painfully slower.

Unfortunately this game still has a near monopoly on the asymmetric competitive game genre, so there isn't really many competitors I can point you towards instead. Honestly, though, just save your money; there are many, many better games you can spend your hard-earned money, in both the competitive, co-operative, and power-fantasy spaces. Throw a dart if you have to; many cost as much as just one cosmetic in Dead by Daylight, so you'll still be saving money in all likelyhood!

TL:DR; Game

ORIGINAL (POSITIVE) REVIEW:
All and all a very good game. You know horror is doing something right when you're own heartbeat makes it hard to hear the characters heartbeat.

Load times can be a pain, and thats due to the peer-to-peer connection system the game insist on using (this games one major flaw). The tutorial is also somewhat difficult to find (its in the options rather than up front, and a message stating that does not appear when you first start up the game to let you know of that), but this is a rather minor flaw compared to the above.

The game is also somewhat prone to glitching, but for the most part these glitches are simply cosmetic (and even occasionally worth a chuckle).

However, any game that makes you absolutely terrified without losing the fun succeeds as a horror game in my books. If they fixed the issue above, this game would easilly be an amazing horror game (even, dare I say, on par with Amnesia). As it stands (from an admitted newb), its just an alright horror game; worth your time if you have money to spare, but otherwise look elsewhere.

Either buggy to hell or the games decides that when it wants to update it'll force crash your game, I do not recomend it unless you have time to sit and do nothing every so often while the game downloads something that steam won't let you stop.