Survival horror games have been an integral part of video games, for as long as I can remember. In the 1990s, games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill and the Parasite Eve series set the bar for the Genre, attracting millions of people who loved these series with the rage of demonic dogs. In an attempt to pay homage to the Genre in the 1990s, the developers Invader Studios and the publisher created Destructive Creations and All in! Games has released Daymare: 1998, a survival Horror adventure in the style of RE that will scare you. In the Magical city of Keen Sight, you play as three unique protagonists whose lives are inextricably linked to discover the definitive truth about the events of 1998 in the northwest of America that led to a massive zombie strike.
Look, if you’ve played any of the survival Horror games released in the 1990s, then you’ll know what you’re looking for with Daymare: 1998. The Gameplay is achieved by allowing you, dear player, to choose the method with which you want to experience the game. You can use tank control in the old style, for which the first games of this Genre are known, or you can change it to a more modern control system, closer to modern third-person survival Horror games. I hated tank controls at the time, so I mostly played with the more modern controls which are only moderately better, but make the controls a little easier. If you are looking for a more authentic experience, then the old tank controls will be the way you want to play.
Once you get used to the game controls, it’s time to figure out how all the elements of the game design fit together. Gameplay takes place in an over-the-shoulder, third-person perspective. You have the use of a flashlight, a pistol, a rifle and an additional object that you can assign to the four distinct directions of the directional pad to quickly access them. By pressing the touchpad on the PS4 / PS5, you also have access to the D. I. D. or the data exchange device. This is basically your pause screen, where you can access everything you need to progress in the game, statistics of your characters, information on upgrading skills, the map of the area, as well as weapons and items, to name just a few.
While Daymare: 1998 does some things well, there is one aspect of the gameplay that I would not mention in this review. Like many games of that era, Zombies are basically bullet sponges. They really only have one strike which is to just throw at you until they are a few meters away and then jump at you. Ammunition, as you might expect, is scarce, so the defense against Zombies boils down to sending them with as little available ammunition as possible. It just boils down to headshots for everyone, which quickly became uninteresting. A little variation on how Zombies could be defeated would have gone a long way.
The graphics of the game are actually quite good, considering that this is a relapse in games that reach the age of thirty. The design of the environments is excellent with appropriate reflections, dark areas interrupted by lights from above or from a computer screen, as well as the drawings of the characters. The uniforms of the rapid response team to which they belong, as well as the bloody and dilapidated clothes of those who were victims of the unfortunate consequences of the epidemic, are impeccable and in fact very impressive. Where the character design falls flat is in almost all the face drawings of the same characters. It seems that the head designs were brought to a completely different Studio, because they don’t really look like real people and look very remarkably unfinished.
The graphics of the game are actually quite good, considering that this is a relapse in games that reach the age of thirty. The design of the environments is excellent with appropriate reflections, dark areas interrupted by lights from above or from a computer screen, as well as the drawings of the characters. The uniforms of the rapid response team to which they belong, as well as the bloody and dilapidated clothes of those who were victims of the unfortunate consequences of the epidemic, are impeccable and in fact very impressive. Where the character design falls flat is in almost all the face drawings of the same characters. It seems that the head designs were brought to a completely different Studio, because they don’t really look like real people and look very remarkably unfinished.
Overall, I think Daymare: 1998 is a game that will appeal only to a small audience who choose the golden days of survival horror. I played the game on both my launch PS4 and my new PS5 and it worked fine on both. My problems with this game are not only based on how the game presents itself today as a finished project, but also on the fact that I never really liked how many of these first games were played back then. Those tank controls were terrible and made the game unnecessarily difficult because you had to action against the controls to be able to play at all. If you remember, in Resident Evil 4 you could not run and shoot at the same time, and this game was released in 2005. This problem was solved in a after re-release of the game, but this type of control simply does not work in a modern gaming environment, even in a game that pays homage to the past.
