The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

After the very nice Evil Dead The Game, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre proves that we can adapt a legendary work without destroying it. The game is clearly a nice homage to Tobe Hooper's cult Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We find all the ingredients of the feature film between the locations, the objects which become mechanics (chicken cages, bones etc.), the grain of madness that we can have during certain parts and characters who are more careful than in the usual for the genre. Playing as a member of the Family is inevitably easier, but being on the Victim side brings another tension. A good immersion in this universe, and that of asymmetrical horror games, but which suffers from its blatant lack of content, the animations and modeling of the characters, and its too clean image. It would clearly have been necessary to dirty the visuals to further improve the atmosphere. If you're a fan and you start it, you should enjoy your few games, but for how long?

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre not only does justice to the film it is inspired by, but is also a good exponent of the genre it belongs to. Unfortunately, however, the experience is characterized by a repetitiveness that becomes apparent rather quickly due not only to the serious lack of content available at launch, but also to a fairly rigid gameplay setting, which makes all the games similar to each other. While waiting to find out if and how the offer will be expanded with the reveal of the roadmap by the developers, we can say that we are faced with a product that still deserves to be tried by fans of games of this type, especially by those who can dive into the game via Xbox Game Pass.

It’s safe to say that our time with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre so far has had its ups and downs. We’ve generally loved playing as a killer, using our various skills to hunt down and execute unfortunate victims. Playing as a victim, however, our feelings are more complicated. Getting slaughtered while having no idea where you should be going or what you should be doing isn’t particularly enjoyable, though thankfully things do pick up once you’ve learned the maps a little. The sometimes finicky contextual actions and troublesome matchmaking remain, though, and the latter is only likely to get worse. In any case, there’s lots of fun to be had here for multiplayer horror fans. We’re just intrigued to see how Sumo Digital and Gun Interactive plan to keep the experience balanced and interesting in the long-term.

The game is extremely faithful to the film which is an equal plus. What helps well in gameplay is that the maps are very well designed and the game has the necessary depth through the skill trees, which adds to the gameplay. At the same time, the content is quite limited and the game has some balance issues, as well as technical issues. As a result, the final result does not come out optimally. Despite these points, the game is worth a try for fans of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an asymmetric horror game that falters due to an excessive amount of mechanics, overly repetitive gameplay, and predictability, yet it may still appeal to fans of the slasher horror franchise.

Even though the game is fun in its own way, at launch there just isn’t enough about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to make it anything but mid. Hopefully given time, it will get new content but all we can do is wait and see.