Friday the 13th: The Game
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| Friday the 13th: The Game | ||||||||||||||
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 Go and kill this game, Jason
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Friday the 13th: The Game is an asymmetrical survival horror game by Gun Media and formerly Illfonic. It features the iconic horror movie slasher Jason Voorhees.
Development
Originally, this wasn't going to be a licensed game, but instead a homage to Friday the 13th called Summer Camp. However, that all changed when Gun Media CEO, Wes Keltner, received a phone call from Horror Inc., who offered the license for Friday the 13th. The problem was Horror Inc. didn't know how modern games worked so Illfonic went on the hunt for a publisher. Sadly, any publisher Illfonic went to weren't interested mainly because they saw as too risky with some harping back to the idea licensed games don't do well or players would simply be not interested at all. The team then decided to open a Kickstarter, which was a massive success, raising over $800,000. They planned for the game to be on all three major platforms at the time and saw how popular the game had become leading them to up their Beta servers from 5,000 to 30,000 believing to have solved the issue of not accommodating for all who wanted to play. This didn't solve the issue, however, as there were over 75,000 players trying to play the game, which took Illfonic by surprise. This caused the Xbox version to be practically unplayable. To make up for the rocky launch, the team offered players lots of free content. Fortunately, things went smoothly after this especially commercially as the game sold 1.5 million copies. This didn't last long as a franchise lawsuit between Horror Inc.'s Sean Cunningham and the writer of the original Friday the 13th, Victor Miller prevented all new content from being made as Victor believed he owned all characters established in his original script. Sadly, Victor won the lawsuit and therefore all planned updates to the game were cancelled and the servers for the game were shut down in November 2020, though it still can be played through peer-to-peer. This devastated Illfonic and caused fans to be upset believing Illfonic was responsible which wasn't case.
Qualities That Should Get Killed Jason
- Every planned upcoming DLC such as Über Jason, The Grendel Map, etc. were all cancelled due to a franchise lawsuit with Victor Miller, in which said person won it. The only upcoming feature that saw the light of day was dedicated servers and bug fixes.
- Like Dead by Daylight, Friday the 13th is still buggy after a lot of fixes for the game, except the bugs here are much worse.
- There was a bug where you could access Jasons that you haven’t unlocked yet though playing the bots mode. Doing that method online would have the chosen Jason’s textures look out of place, making him look more hideous somehow. That bug was patched, but it came back in a future update.
- If a counsellor disconnects during the moment Jason kills them with one of his selectable kills, it WOULDN'T COUNT! Which isn’t good for the player using him as it will decrease the number of kills you were supposed to have.
- While the environments look good, the character models, specifically the Counselors, look awful. Many of the counselors look as if they're made of plastic; the faces of the counselors, in particular, fall into the uncanny valley at times due to the poor texture shading on the heads.
- Every selectable Jason plays the exact same except, with some differences such as lacking the ability to run, stun durability, how much health, etc.
- The game has Roy Burns from Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning as a playable Jason. He's not Jason and therefore doesn't share the same powers and attributes as Jason since he's supposed to be a human. Roy even has Pamela Voorhees’s voice talking to him.
- There's a feature for Jason to have different weapons was added, but you have to reach a higher level before you can use it.
- A player is randomly picked as Jason, which means there will be a lot of disconnections by players because they were not chosen to be Jason.
- The servers are full of griefers and cheaters, such as players who help Jason.
- Some characters are overpowered.
- Vanessa is considered to be the best Counselor, much to the ire of even the most skilled Jason players, mainly due to her combination of excellent Speed, high Stamina, and decent Luck. These three statistics makes her the most effective Counselor to 'kite' Jason, which is accomplished by evading Jason for as long as possible by jumping into one cabin to another, and attacking him by surprise to regain lost Stamina used to run away again.
- Tommy Jarvis. He automatically has a shotgun and a pocket knife. While this does make sense for him to come prepared (GQ #3). He is the hardest counselor for Jason to deal with. Although he is only playable for certain players who have either died or escaped once Tommy is contacted beforehand.
- Savini Jason. When controlled by an experienced player, Savini Jason can often wreck a team of Counselors before they manage to achieve anything. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he still remains a Kickstarter-exclusive reward.
- Some of Jason's kills were turned into paid DLCs.
- The A.I. of the counselors can be outright terrible to anticipate on the single player challenges. Even if you know where, when, and how to do all the Skull objectives, you'll often get the computer bots messing around forcing you to restart and sit through the unskippable cutscene again. From Bugsy jumping in and out of windows endlessly, to Jenny sitting in the car but refusing to drive away so you can attack the vehicle. The worst offenders of this are challenges 6, 7 and 8 which are difficult, and on strict time limits.
Qualities That Would Survive Jason
- Great soundtrack consisting of "The Summer of Heat" and "Killer", which have an appropriate 80's tone, especially when the franchise was from the '80s.
- A lot of kills to use for Jason, and some are brutal.
- Tommy Jarvis is in the game and automatically has a shotgun and a pocket knife. Even though it sounds too overpowered and annoying, it makes sense because he is known to be the first character to kill Jason in the movies, also being the final counselor in Part IV - Part VI.
- There are dance emotes that are fun to use, one of them being called Shake It.
- Despite the poor models, the environments generally look good and the models for all the Jasons look great and accurate their movie-counterparts.
Reception
Friday the 13th: The Game received "mixed or average" reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic. Many criticized the amount bugs, graphics, and believed the game needed more maps. Others praised the gory kill animations and the many homages from the films.
The game sold 1.8 million copies as of August 2017. Despite mixed reviews, the game went on to win the Best Indie Game award at the 35th Annual Golden Joystick Awards, though it was nominated for Best Multiplayer Game. The game was also nominated and became a runner-up for "Best Multiplayer" at the IGN Best of 2017 Awards, although it won the 2017 People's Choice Award. In addition, the game was nominated for "Game Design, New IP" and "Game, Original Action" at the 17th Annual National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers Awards. GamesRadar+ ranked the game 14th on their list of the 25 Best Games of 2017