The long awaited Halloween: The Game has finally been released. The idea is simple: survive Haddonfield, or hunt everyone as Michael Myers.
Early players are already finding out that Myers isn’t the only problem. The launch is full of bugs, glitches, and broken trophy tracking. For horror fans and trophy hunters, that first impression is frustrating. Underneath the mess, though, the game still has a lot of potential.
Turning a famous horror series into a multiplayer game is hard, and this one is dealing with the usual launch issues.
Collision and map problems show up a lot. Survivors and killers clip through walls and objects, get stuck in porch steps, or float in the air during grab animations. Combat also feels rough. Swings miss even when they look like they should hit, and stealth kills don’t always match what’s happening on screen. Servers aren’t stable either. Matchmaking drops happen, and desync can make players rubber-band across the map in the middle of a chase.
For trophy and achievement hunters, the launch state is especially frustrating. Several progression-based unlocks are currently failing to track properly or are completely bugged:
Purely and simply Evil - Trophy Tracker and in game tracker don't match us and sometimes one will go up and not the other.
Heroic - Simply will just stop tracking.
No Page Unturned - Some challenges not updating properly.
Wrong Number - Flat out not unlocking for some people.
There are about 9 total trophies and achievements with some form of issue. They are different depending on the platform you are playing on.
Those problems matter, but they shouldn’t be confused with the game itself. When Halloween works, it captures slasher tension better than most licensed multiplayer horror games. The developers nailed the tone of the Halloween movies.
What makes the messy launch so surprising? Normally, games like this already have a pretty clear blueprint. Good examples of this are Dead by Daylight and Friday the 13th: The Game; which also launched with a lot of issues. However, they got massively better over time. Halloween can go down in the books as a success as long as the team follows through with stability patches, trophy fixes, and real support.
Haddonfield is messy right now, but the future still looks pretty bright. Let’s cross out fingers and hope licensing problems don’t get in the way.