Halloween is just around the corner, so what better time to review a horror game! Identity V is a good game by all means, but my experience with it is love-hate. If you're a big fan of Dead by Daylight on PC and you have a craving for getting caught in horror movie schemes on the go, this game could be for you!
In a Nutshell
Overall Score: 3.7 out of 5
Pros:
- charming art style
- lots of content
- tense gameplay with varying character skills
Cons:
- buttons are difficult to manage
- story seems like an excuse to set-up the game
- deep learning curve
Overview
Identity V is an asymmetric (4-vs-1) multiplayer game that puts you in the role of either a survivor or a hunter in a mental recreation of a detective trying to solve his past. As a survivor, your mission is to stay alive and get some machines going in order to escape, and as the hunter, your task is to keep them from doing so. In both roles, you have a choice of different characters with very different skill sets and abilities. Different hunters have different methods of hunting, while survivors have various ways of escaping or hindering the hunters while they go about getting to the machines. The gameplay sounds simple enough, but it does seem to get more in-depth with different characters.
Story/Lore and Aesthetics
I mentioned a detective earlier. While the story is can be almost independent from the game, it is still quite fleshed out and provides a lot of flavour to the game's atmosphere. Since the story can be almost inconsequential, let's get this bit out of the way.
In a nutshell, the game's story follows a novelist-turned-detective who has bouts of amnesia. Through a series of events, he found himself at a manor that is heavily implied to be his family's and he recreates scenarios of those that have visited the manor over time. The game's bits of lore follow each character's connection to the manor and the detective.
That's really all there is to say about the story. You do get some biographical bits every now and then of each character on completion of some objectives, and some events give out some bits of information on who the main character is, but apart from that, this is about all that is significant enough to be mentioned. It feels as though the lore was created just to fit the stylistic decisions of the game.
The aesthetics of the game is very Tim Burton-esque. It has an almost cute appearance despite being overall dark and depressing in tone. The character designs of the survivors are human-like and relatable, despite the characters being explicitly designed to be dolls. The hunters are quite menacing in their designs as well, and the hunters released earlier on in the game's lifetime didn't look like they were in any way human (or doll-like.) The text choices are also nice on the eyes and fit very well with the game's overall look. The alternate costumes that get released do look very interesting as well.
Button graphics and the graffiti tag graphics are quite varied in my opinion. Button graphics are a bit too translucent for me to care about, but they are minimalistic so that they don't hinder gameplay. Outside of the match, the button graphics look good. It's the same story for most of the tags. In-game they are almost non-existent and difficult to spot, but when picking them out on the menu they look alright. Profile pictures for the most part look okay. I personally don't have strong feelings towards any of the profile pictures, but the frames that you can unlock are garish and tacky, at best.
Mechanics
Part of the reason mobile action games aren't as popular as PC games is that they are generally a lot more difficult to be reactive with. Identity V is an example of that weakness. I touched on button presses earlier when talking about interacting with the environment as a hunter. Certainly a player an get used to doing touch screen command when chasing a survivor, but it takes a bit of conditioning to do so. The buttons' touch-sensing areas are a tad small, and depending on your device it could be annoyingly easy to accidentally press a button you don't want to. Add in to the mix that some buttons change depending on what you are next to, and the game could turn to be a challenge in dexterity.
What takes some real adaptability, though, are the buttons that appear on objects or in the middle of the screen. These buttons appear on the machines, gates, and other survivors. These buttons are tricky to tap as they are actually moving targets. If you are walking towards a machine, it's tricky to pinpoint where you are tapping, depending on how fast you are going. This is made even more challenging when a player wants to interact with another survivor, and in those situations, there is usually a hunter chasing them. With static on-screen buttons, it is difficult to determine whether you are actually hitting them or not. There is a meter for the static buttons, but the change is quite negligible.
Movement and camera control follows the standard scheme for third- or first-person mobile games. The default is to control the movement by dragging with the left side of the screen, while camera control requires dragging and swiping on the right side of the screen. Again, the screen size is a big factor for this. If a player has a tablet, for example, they would have a mechanical advantage over someone with a smartphone.
Gameplay
Now, on to the meat. The main objectives are very simple, as mentioned earlier: survive and get out, or kill everyone. The details are bit more involved. Hunters need to kill the survivors by knocking them out and bringing them to a rocket chair. Survivors get knocked out by getting hit twice with a swing, or once if they are interrupted in a task animation. Once they are knocked out, they can be picked up and brought to an active rocket chair. The survivors can struggle out of the hunter's grip if they are given enough time, so the hunter needs to be quick in getting to a chair.
Most hunters are faster than their prey, but they all have different abilities. The very first hunter available to play is able to plant puppets that can detect survivors near them and provide a place to teleport to. Another hunter is able to lay down webs to slow and trap the survivors. Yet another can throw out a hook in a straight line to reel in their quarry. These abilities become unlocked as the game goes on by an increase of the hunter's presence. The hunter can gain presence by landing hits on survivors, so momentum is a very heavy part of this game, and survivors must do everything they can to stay hidden and undetected.
Hunters can equip different supplemental abilities that are not unique as well. These abilities are more for support, providing means of surveillance, mobility, or other utilities. Of course, these secondary abilities are easily countered. The default ability "listen" gives the survivors a very short warning before it actually activates, allowing them to escape detection if they are quick enough. Other detection abilities also give a notification that the survivor has been discovered, allowing the survivor to escape the area. Hiding in the area where they were detected usually won't help.
If the description of what the hunters can do makes them sound overpowered, it's because they are. The downside for them is that there is only one of them, and there are four survivors. If the survivors can work well enough together, they can easily evade the hunter's efforts and escape. Getting placed on a rocket chair isn't necessarily game over for the captured survivor. There is a timer that shows the survivors how much time they have to rescue the captured, and they can return to the task of getting the machines to work, albeit at an injured state. Even if a survivor is incapacitated, a teammate can come by and help them up. If the downed survivor has done enough self-healing, the time needed for them to get up is lessened when the teammate comes by.
Once rescued, the survivor will be one strike away from being incapacitated again unless healed, but they are able to interact with the machines to progress towards their goal. The machines themselves can be a cause of detection as they randomly have some quick-time events. Every now and then, a meter will appear on the screen, and you need to time a button press so that you hit a sweet spot on the meter. This makes it so that you need to actually pay attention to the task at hand while at the same time keeping an eye out for the hunter. If you fail the quick time event, the machine shorts out and the hunter is alerted of your presence.
Of course, the survivors aren't exactly pushovers either. Each character has their own starting accessory that gives them a unique ability. As examples, the lawyer can look at a map and see where all the objectives are, the thief can shine a flashlight at the hunter and incapacitate them for a short time, and the doctor can use her syringe to heal herself and other players faster. Each character's accessory provides some way to make the hunter's game miserable, and if used well, even make the hunter almost harmless.
Additionally, while the survivors are being chased, they have environmental interactions that can impede the hunter. They can run by pallets and throw them down, blocking or stunning the hunter, or they can vault over low walls and out of windows. Generally, vaulting over low walls slows down the hunter quite a bit. They are slower to mount the obstacles, and the button to press for interacting with the said obstacle can be tricky for a novice to deal with.
There are three speeds a survivor can move in: crouch-walk, walk, and sprint. Sprinting leaves a trail of red string that disappears after a short time. Sprinting also scares off crows that are scattered throughout the map, creating a lot of noise the hunter can hone in on. These clues allow for some mind games between the hunter and the survivors. Will the hunter follow the trail left behind nearby, or go for the distant crow that is close to a machine?
Timing has some importance in the game. As I touched on earlier, survivors get down if they are caught by a swipe in the middle of an operation such as working on a machine or vaulting over something. Running to vault versus walking up to the wall to vault changes the timing drastically. Of course, the slower mounting is a lot quieter, and the running vault causes a noise loud enough for the hunter to hear halfway across the map.
Learning Curve
There is a lot more to this game than I can cover. There are a lot of strategies and tricks that I simply cannot even grasp. There are also perks that can be customised, which comes in the form of skill trees. The survivors and hunters each come with a curve that allow for different strategies and play styles. Add this to the already challenging control system that is inherent to playing on the smartphone, and you have a game that can easily get competitive.
More than once, I've gotten incredibly frustrated at my lack of ability to catch survivors because I didn't know enough about the game. Different hunters seem to have different ranges for their attacks, and there are so many survivors at this point in time that it would take a significant amount of time to study each one's capabilities. This was also true for the hunters, when I was playing on the survivor's side. Frame knowledge is also incredibly helpful in this game, where if you time your pallet drops, you can stun the hunter. If you time your swing correctly, you can down the survivors instantly.
The game's play type inherently attracts cheesy plays as well. Of course, as with any type of cheese, there are counters. However, it needs to be mentioned again that cheese strategies take time to figure out how to counter. Obviously the game has enough of a population for people to figure out the different cheese strategies and their counters, but a new player would have to be very invested in the game or competitive in nature to push past their initial defeats to do research or learn the ropes.
Content
There is a lot of content available in this game, and the game is constantly updated with new characters, or at the very least, aesthetic items. The dice and board game idea for rewards is a good draw for puzzle pieces and season packages. The season packages contain graffiti tags and costumes that have different probabilities of being acquired.
There are events as well that let you get event-specific costumes or tags. Some events include new variations of the base game. For example, there is a blackjack ruleset for determining game winners at the time of writing this post. Cards are shuffled and drawn to determine roles and rules, from what I can understand. Unfortunately, they are only open during certain hours of the day, making it difficult to get into if you're playing the game casually.
Final Thoughts
I'd say the game is overall a 3.7 out of 5.
The game itself is very fleshed out and I can absolutely see the appeal, but for me it is basically the embodiment of Stockholm Syndrome. The game constantly frustrates you with almost captures, near escapes, or unskilled teammates, but on the other side of the coin, there are tons of content. I didn't cover much of the extra things you could do simply because there was no way for me to access the other features. The features are only available at certain times of day, so it would not be fair for me to include them in my rating of the game.
Unfortunately, you can only play variations of the same objectives so many times before you get bored. Customisation takes a long time to complete, and it feels like a grind and a lot of effort to get new aesthetic items. The game can lose it shine really quickly if you don't have any friends interested in playing the game with you, or if you aren't competitive by nature. If you do get friends in with you, the game becomes that much more entertaining, although that an be said of any other activity.
Thanks for reading!