I’m so excited for the latest “Five Nights at Freddy’s” game! Scott recently said that the game will be out on February 19!
Wait… he said January 22? Wow, that’s a whole month earlier! Super stoked!
Hang on, it’s out now? Well, $#!%! Time to rush into this review!
“FNAF World” is a spin-off of the video game phenomenon known as “Five Nights at Freddy’s.” Within a year, the series developer Scott Cawthon released four installments of the franchise, with each entry changing up the previous entry’s gameplay in some unique way. The first required your attention to be directed at the animatronics (Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy) while keeping an eye on power supply. The second forced players to check on a demented toy while keeping the other animatronics at bay. FNAF 3 set the threat level to one animatronic, but threw in more hallucinations to distract players. Finally, the fourth stripped the player of any advantages and only gave us a flashlight and our ears to listen for the approaching nightmares.
What this series is best known for is the jump scares and how its PlayStation FMV sequence-esque animations can scare the living crap out of any gamer. Eat your heart out, “Resident Evil!”
The latest FNAF game has a different approach and a new face. This time, not only does the game take form as a traditional RPG, but all of the characters have been cute-ified. The nightmare-fuel inducing robots look more like a children’s cartoon while still keeping some discomforting tones in the story.
Speaking of which, the story does not dilly-dally. As soon as you make your party of eight characters, you’re instantly greeted by FredBear, who informs you that something in the FNAF World has gone wrong. After exploring the Atari styled world and picking a few fights with some other robotic creatures, FredBear introduces you to the “subtunnel” system, a slightly significant part to exploring the world. Using these will take you to more sinister-feeling areas of graphics much more simplistic than Atari visuals.
“FNAF World” utilizes an active-time battle system, which means you’ll have to think quickly and plan your attacks on the fly. This isn’t a good thing, but it’s not a bad thing either. I would be just fine with this decision if only it didn’t assault my eyes so much. Every move is practically trying to give me epilepsy or loss of vision from too many visual effects. Screen-shaking, bright colors, and fast animations make the experience a little bit like a wild acid trip. By the time the experience being dealt, I can’t really comprehend what I did right in my strategy or I won’t be able to see a character low on health because there are light blue beams and pink fireworks blazing across the screen. So, sure, give me the experience points, but please don’t make me feel like I just tried staring into the sun for a full minute.
Exploration isn’t too bad, though. I enjoy exploring the basic layout while listening to the lovely soundtrack. It can be very relaxing until the eye-assault begins at random, an annoying staple to most traditional RPGs. I’ll be putting these songs on to relax in my apartment for a bit after I finish the game. However, the exploration lacks in clear direction, which is fine. I like RPGs that let you just roam around and take on challenges, but some of these tasks aren’t given any acknowledgement. You’ll find caves that have bosses, but don’t really have much purpose unless you find a stat-booster. But there isn’t much else.
Speaking of stats, I hope you know your RPGs or else you’re going to be lost on what exactly anything does. Descriptions are completely absent, so be prepared to make guesses as you play the game. You’ll have to assume from names and animations.
Scott has recently come out and apologized for such a rushed and messy release. To try and compensate, he promises to release updates in the future to make this game a bit more playable. Hopefully, this will be fixed before the mobile release. I’d like to play this on my Kindle without the risk of going blind.
Until that happens, “FNAF World” for the PC gets two eye assaults out of five.
