Daymare 1998 begins with you playing as a part of the special ops group Hades.
You get an emergency call from an Aegis Lab, which you are sent out to research. It turns out the scientists have been working with some type of mysterious gas which infects anyone who occupies it in. If they become infectedthey turn into zombie-like monsters, and you have to put them . After you clear the lab and get a sample of this gasoline, your team leaves the lab and heads straight back to base.
The helicopter had the gas samples board and released it into a nearby town with the crash. With the entire city infected, you need to find a way to call for an evac. Before you do so, though, you switch characters and perform as a local fire watch/park ranger. He avoided the gas but today is trying to get back to his wife and get out before they’re eaten.
The survival horror genre is a little one, but it is obvious Daymare 1998 takes queues from both Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Evil labs, special ops team, an infected town, hallucinations, superweapons, and a lot of stock management — the gang’s all here. The puzzles in this game place the current-gen Resident Evil names to pity, and actually challenge players to think outside the box. They also have locker codes such as the newer Resident Evil titles, so it’s a fantastic split of hard and easy puzzles. There’s one in particular which entailed the Greek alphabet which was up there on the problem scale. Just be ready to use your mind several times.
Just be warned that battle can sometimes be janky. It is possible to shoot and move; there aren’t any tank controllers or camera angles here. The pistols occasionally feel like they have a delay between hitting and the enemy being staggered. It was little, but it would sometimes make me shoot twice, costing me precious bullets. But when you eventually get the shotgun, everything changes. A single shot sets off a ferocious impact that dismisses limbs and heads with ease. I think they place more shotgun shells from the sport, because they knew that the shotgun is your exceptional weapon in the sport.
There is one weird mechanic which didn’t actually do anything for me personally.
After that you can switch between four or three clips with either standard or hollow-point ammo and reload your weapon. It never added a degree of stress during any struggle. On the contrary, it was slow and frustrating since I needed to always do it after battle. The shotgun reloads cubes, so it does not apply there, yet again proving the shotgun is exceptional.
Let’s discuss how scary the game really is. In all honesty, it is not. I did jump a few occasions, but they were equally inexpensive jump scares. It will raise your stress when you have a single clip of ammo left and also don’t understand what’s around the corner. I played on normal rather than ran completely out of ammo. A few of the things they add to scare you wind up getting annoying. If you take them, they vanish, and you waste a bullet. Additionally, it contrasts with the screen so you can not see for a second, which involves you taking damage. It is not frightening; just aggravating.
There are bigger ones that take multiple bullets to bring down along with a few bosses too.
The normal zombies move fast and can catch you after one slide up. Sometimes their placement feels cheap, as they are right around a corner waiting to catch you. Additionally, I felt as though they chased them in random spots once I was backtracking. They do go down in one shot into the head most times, and it is a welcome change from the existing Resident Evil games. Just know that you will be seeing a lot of the identical enemy throughout the sport.
Even though there isn’t much in the way of unwanted content, you have some collectibles it is possible to shoot. In addition to that, there’s a hacking minigame to gain you access to new rooms and new loot. I believe that they are meant to be optional, but the ammo and supplies often feel as a requirement. Oddly enough, there is a store you’ll be able to use in particular rooms too. Here you can swap your items for products and access the worldwide thing box. I used it to find an excess hacking tool and clip, and didn’t use it then.
There’s a whole lot of pop in when running through the forests. I also had a crash, but mercifully did not lose a ton of progress. Near the end of the game, the walls all disappeared, and that I could undergo locked rooms. I ended up falling through the ground before the game crashed. However, I did not detect any frame drops.
While Daymare 1998 is not going to light the survival horror world on fire, it’s a solid first attempt at the genre. Be certain to watch a few videos to get a feel for it first.
