Dreamkiller – Review (PC)

I personally love the survival horror genre but I decided to try out something a little different. As I was looking around on Steam, I found Dreamkiller developed by Mindware Studios, which seemed to have an interesting plot. During the beginning cutscene, you are introduced to its main character, Alice Drake, where she explains that she uses her ability of entering dreams to assist her patients. She continues on saying that she sometimes has to remind herself where her mind begins and her patient’s mind ends. If you’ve seen Nightmare on Elm Street 3, the main character Kirsten can bring other people into her dreams. This is basically the same idea but instead of fearing just one child-killing maniac with one-liners, it’s a variety of monsters created by the many phobias that Alice’s patients have.

At the beginning of each level, you are shown a case file of each patient.  It describes the issues of the patient and diagnosis, ranging from the fear of spiders to the fear of working too much. The monsters then are the representation of the fear itself where you have to fight them with the weapons you are given by the patient. I personally liked the shotgun/freeze ray because I felt sort of like Subzero from MK2. I would shoot them with my secondary to freeze and then blast them with my shotty. The various monsters I encountered were sneaky and would kill me with a few shots, but I would reload with another life. I was definitely not a fan of the spiders I had to deal with, so being attacked and surrounded by them scared the crap out of me. I was annoyed by Alice’s dialogue a few times for no reason, but the auto-save helped me forget it once it happened and then the action continued.

I liked the idea behind the game and that some of the graphics were kept dark and ominous because it stayed true to its psychological thriller genre. It was not a slow game, but a very in-your-face type of gameplay. It was intense and fast paced during the monster sequences. The graphics are not perfect but the feel of the levels gave off a good atmosphere. Throughout the game, I kept looking for some fear inducing graphics or monsters, but I felt that it didn’t reach that point. One of the bosses called a doorkeeper was made well, but I hoped he would’ve had more powers to fight with.  Instead, he was given the ability to resurrect the monsters I would kill and shot balls of light at me. I was able to maneuver myself, such as dodge and run around. However, I was able to round up a horde of monsters, including the boss, by running in a circle. As soon as I had a huge mob of them, I would shoot a grenade and would take a least half of them out. That ‘strategy’ was very effective in almost all of the levels I dealt with, but it made the gameplay very predictable and this almost stopped me from wanting to finish the game.

I decided to try out the multiplayer option and saw I had the ability play deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag and conquest. I logged onto the deathmatch lobby for a quick match and found 3 other people playing so I dropped in for a few kills. It was fun shooting a bit and blowing people up with some of the guns found in the single-player game, but I grew a little tired of it after a few minutes. Don’t get me wrong; I love being able to get all my stress out with a few rounds of shooting, but I needed an objective so I went back to the single-player to attempt to complete another level.

Overall, I liked that it was an indie game because it sounded like it had an interesting plot. It was nothing outstanding but not a total loss. It was just an interesting twist to psychological treatment. Though, it makes me wonder if my insurance would ever cover it. However, I felt that this game failed to keep my interest and left me wandering to other games. This game does not stray from its FPS nature and it gives you the ability to take out some virtual stress on some monsters or other people via LAN, but nothing more. I actually thought of this game as a 2.5, but if you like to jump into action and shoot monsters up with predictable gameplay then you might view this game differently.

Tags: Crystal R. Dreamkiller fps