The Blackout Club Review

"Coop Horror"

Campaign

July 31, 2019 at 3:16am
By Jason Stettner

This is a cooperative focused adventure meant for four players to work together. It’s a horror themed experience with procedurally generated missions and a variety of creepy enemies. There’s a rather interesting prologue, and that sets the stage for the experience. It’s honestly a bit disappointing at the start since the initial area was really enticing, and it just opens up in a different way afterwards. That’s not to say regular gameplay isn’t fun, that initial tutorial type area just set up a really intriguing narrative that wasn’t used to its full potential.

Moving past that, you’ll play as a customized kid that has a selection of tools and powers. You’ll work in a squad to complete a series of random objectives. That’s really all there is to this game. You’re either collecting items placed in the world, recording evidence on your phone or trying to sneak past creepy possessed individuals. There’s definitely a story there, it’s just left for this multiplayer play setup. That’s fine too, I just felt that they could have had something real neat with where things were headed with this concept.

Gameplay

This game presents a first person perspective, with a horror theme to it. It was somewhat chilling in its opening, but the regular gameplay is more action based. You move through dark neighborhoods, creeping in underground caves and chilling out back at the regular hub train car. The visuals are actually fairly impressive, despite not being enhanced on Xbox One X. That being said, I did notice some performance issues here or there.

For the most part it plays well, you’re either sneaking around collecting things or running trying to get away from what’s chasing you. There are neat battle mechanics, and cooperative play is essential here. It’s quite fun when you get working with a good group, I believe playing with a group of friends might be particularly neat. The phone element makes sense, and it honestly isn’t used enough within this. There’s a fair selection of objectives, but these quickly grow repetitive when you work through a few of them in each run.

The levels aren’t particularly long, they’re mostly quick to work through. There are a few environments to play within, but each of them felt very similar in terms of the buildings and layouts. They had a new atmosphere each time, but as soon as you got to the missions it felt like the exact same situation as the neighborhood section from before.

The Conclusion

The Blackout Club brings some interesting ideas, a fun cooperative setting and it mostly dips when it comes to the repetitive style of play. You’re essentially doing the exact same thing multiple times with little to no variation within it. This gets quite old, rather quickly. I liked working with others, and the mechanics are very well implemented.

You get to use some neat tools, and there are multiple ways to handle the basically horrific brain dead folks that creep around. The core aspect of this runs is great, but there’s not much aside from that. The environments feel incredibly repetitive, as do the objectives you have. The level system feels somewhat slow, and unrewarding. It’s nice that they allowed some customization elements in regards to your character.

I think there’s potential for this to perhaps be expanded upon down the road, but what’s present feels a bit too shallow at the moment. That’s a shame, the opening segment was really neat and this was fun for a short time. Again, really neat concept here and I love the atmosphere they’ve setup. A cool mystery, not enough narrative to it however.

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The Blackout Club Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by Evolve PR

Rating Overall: 6.0