Review: FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S: SURVIVE 'TIL 6AM GAME, As Scary As Bad Pizza
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the franchise, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a horror video game that puts players at the night shift of a children’s party place (old and creepy location). Players must continue to check cameras and close doors to keep the gruesome animatronics at bay. It is basically a scary version of Red Light, Green Light. This game has had many entries, a lot of them being very, very good, and extremely good at scaring the pants off of its players. Now we have the chance to play the terrifying video game as a suspenseful, and interesting board game.
It can be played as either a solo game or two players. The two-player game mode is exactly the same as the single-player, survive the night. To sum up the game, players will be drawing cards from certain decks in four rooms. Then players would choose to either react to the cards and use energy to protect themselves or let various cards and potentially the animatronics move closer to them. The directions and overall gameplay were needlessly complicated. It makes a lot of sense after playing a few times, but for the simplicity and randomness of the game, it is still kind of complicated. Also, shuffling multiple decks of cards every round for 12 rounds in about 12 minutes gets pretty tiring.
As for the actual gameplay here, the problem that I mainly see is that it’s almost completely up to chance. With cards being drawn at random and rolling dice being the only real mechanics, I think this game is based far too much on chance. Yes, players choose which cards to react to and there is a power amount to keep track of, but smart plays with those parts couldn’t deal with some bad luck. The game as a whole may be entertaining, but it feels fairly uncontrollable and extremely luck-based. It just leaves very little difficulty of though and skill and instead relies on luck. The two-player version is competitive, but it’s still up to the same amount of luck because the winner is just who doesn’t die first or has the most energy at the end of the night, neither player reacts to each other or deals with the same deck of cards, they are basically playing separate games at the same time.
If you are a huge fan of the franchise, or like very light cooperative or single-player games, this game is alright and can give some entertainment. But it’s the reliance on the luck of the draw and roll the dice make the overall experience feel overly complicated and overwhelmingly luck-based.
