Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie
Developer: Invader Studios
Publisher: Destructive Creations, All in! Games
Release Date: Sep 17, 2019
Price: $29.99
Daymare: 1998 has come a long way since it started as a Resident Evil 2 fan remake. Capcom initially didn’t care much about the project because they didn’t care much about Resident Evil, continuing to bury the franchise from its initial inception as a survival horror game and ending up with unkillable MCU-level action heroes. Then Resident Evil 7 brought the series back to form and so Capcom canceled this fan RE2 remake.
Working on a brand new game means you, at the very least, need to write an original story
We all were sad as the fan remake was looking pretty nice, but Capcom wasn’t being an evil corporation, rather they canceled the project because they were working on making their own RE2 remake. The rest is history as the official Resident Evil 2 remake was fantastic and showed that the core RE2 mechanics worked just as well in the modern-day, and the updated visuals made for a frighting experience. Things were good in RE land.
But the RE2 fan remake team decided to continue working and take all they had created and altered it into its own original game that is inspired by Resident Evil 2. This is a huge gamble as working on a fan remake means you already have a fully developed story and mechanics that you are essentially copying. Working on a brand new game means you, at the very least, need to write an original story. I’m here to tell you that the team behind Daymare: 1998 weren’t up to the task of crafting anything close to what Resident Evil 2 offered, let alone a good story on its own. It’s really bad.
Characters are bland, lifeless, and lack any defining features that will last beyond this game. The RE2 cast is iconic, the same can’t be said of anyone in Daymare: 1998. You get generic Hunk clone, some random forest service guy, and third random army dude, and an equally generic pilot. The story likes to jump between the three haphazardly at random which kills the pacing. RE2 was great because you played a full campaign and then played an alternate campaign with things in the world altered. That’s doesn’t happen here. It’s also only been a day or so since I completed the game and I honestly can’t tell you the names of any of the cast or their motivations.
Characters are bland, lifeless, and lack any defining features that will last beyond this game
Before I start ranting I should say thatDaymare: 1998 is a great looking game if you aren’t paying attention to the details. Sorry, I can’t help myself. I have no idea what it is about Unreal 4 but the past few games I’ve played running on the engine feature really poorly designed and rendered characters with horrific facial animations. Everyone looks plastic and cutscenes look like silly putty people flopping about. The environments are pretty as all hell but the characters look like burnt mannequins shuffling about.
On the gameplay side of things, everything feels clunky. It isn’t broken and this is intended, but it just doesn’t work in 2019, something the official RE2 remake understood. There is such a disparity between the modern graphics and dated mechanics. If this were a Resident Evil 2 fan remake as intended I could forgive this, but as this is its own title it feels off. We don’t get tank controls but you do walk painfully slow like you’re carrying around 200 pounds of gear regardless of the character being played. Drawing your weapon is slow, turning is slow, and everything just feels sluggish.
This is inspired by RE2 I hear you scream at me, and yes, that was the intention, but it still sucks in terms of the mechanics and structure of this game. Zombies are plentiful and feel placed haphazardly in most of the areas of the game. Resident Evil 2 was great about using zombies to lead the player to new sections and depending on difficulty, let you fight them or work to avoid them because of the limited ammo drops. Here they just are sort of tossed in your path without reason.
Combat really isn’t this games strong suit and you are far better off running past enemies
Daymare: 1998 isn’t built to accommodate most players. Health is rarer than running into an albino alligator in New Mexico and zombies are positioned in a way that you’ll be struggling to finish a section after being attacked only a few times. Kicking off the game you are dropped into a science facility where some magic gas exploded and turned almost everyone inside into a zombie. It’s actually the most exciting and interesting portion of the game.
In a Resident Evil game, the inro portion is there to teach you the basics of the game. Usually, new players will shoot the zombies and run out of bullets before learning that its all about ammo conservation. The game helps teach you this as you can run past enemies, shake them off when bit, or get plot about the situation explained to you by someone. Daymare: 1998 sort of just throws you in and hopes you figure everything out on the fly without help. The only thing I learned was that I was lost, our hero is an asshole, and puzzles are more annoying than difficult.
Combat really isn’t this games strong suit and you are far better off running past enemies. The problem is that if you are running with these clunky controls you’ll run into objects or get grabbed by zombies laying all over the place. If you take your time everything just feels too slow and highlights the poor level design employed. In one section of the game, I was told to leave a building and get to the parking lot to my car. I run all the way to my car only for the game to tell me in a mini-cutscene that I forgot my keys and to run back to get them. This serves no point other than to lengthen the experience. Anything told on the run back could have been told at any other time.
So, about that combat. It’s not great. Aiming is a pain in the ass and only made worse because there is no way to rebind your controls. In fact, the developers make it clear that you can’t rebind controls and it seems they won’t be changing that. You can’t even use the mouse in the inventory screen because screw convenience. Weapons need to be equipped and you can carry three at most, but usually just two, thankfully in their own slots that don’t take up inventory space. And that’s an issue that’s going to pop up during Daymare: 1998 as the game sort of picks and chooses things from the classic Resident Evil game to use and/or update.
A quick reload will have your throw your current mag on the ground so you can quickly load a secondary mag
Anyways, once equipped you can draw a weapon via the d-pad on your controller. Left rigger goes over-the-shoulder and you get a reticle to aim at zombies. Targetting the head is the way to go, but landing shots is difficult even for a super-secret special forces bro dude and animations make it hard to get any solid feedback on the damage inflicted. Right trigger shoots and after a few bullets, the baddie will fall down. Sometimes they die, other times they get back up to try and chomp you, but you can’t step on their heads so you sort of just wait them out to see how they’re feeling. Sometime you wait and they won’t wake up until you turn around. Different types of bullets do different levels of damage, but it’s the reloading where the game falls apart.
I can’t recall any Resident Evil game every using a system like this and it only makes the experience worse. First off you can’t open the inventory and pause the screen, so good luck reloading or using the few health kits you have. Find yourself surrounded by a group of enemies and you’ll almost certainly be dead. But that won’t matter as reloading is broken. Holding the X button will initiate a painfully slow reload. It’s a very slow and by the books sort of affair if you were making a training video. This isn’t a problem in a relaxed setting but when you’re under threat of imminent death it’s really annoying. But you can initiate a quick reload in a more tense situation.
Don’t ever do this if you value your life. A quick reload will bypass the long animation but at the expense of the current magazine. A quick reload will have your throw your current mag on the ground so you can quickly load a secondary mag. Chances are you’ll only have two mags so losing one is a real problem, especially in an area full of nearby zombies or near steps of some sort. And mags can’t be reloaded to fill them, only swapping them so good luck having a full clip ever.
Sure, you can go back and pick up the mags you dropped later, but you better hope you killed everyone in that area or you’re screwed. The bigger issue is that this is often necessary because of how the RE-based combination system works. You pick up bullets which you then have to combine with your empty magazines. Lose a mag and the game now becomes a real pain in the ass. Again, it’s weird to take the RE combination system but add in your own reload mechanic.
Everything sort of just happens without much rhyme or reason.
If each character had a slightly different mechanic for relaoding I could see this being used to drive the story. Fake Hunk could reload quick and thus has more challenging zombies to contend with. Average forest dude could have the slow and clunky reload to show he’s not trained and so his levels would require fewer zombies but keeping the shotgun that’s loud and draws attention. The third person could then do something else like maybe only having a knife or something, forcing him to stealth about using stealth kills. This would have the system make more sense. But when the top-level navy seal reloads slower then I can, and I’m someone with a boy scouts level of firearm training, we have a problem.
And then there are the zombies you have to deal with. They are all the same but pretty varied in look and appearance, at least in the town. But they don’t simply bite you and you shake them off, instead, they spit acid stuff on you that wrecks you far too quickly. Two zombie attacks and you’re going to have a bad time. Mash the A button all you want but you are going to take a lot of damage and often push them off facing a different direction. What’s worse is the collision detection is something that I never got the hang of. Enemies are very floaty and almost snap onto you with arms out. This means your punch attack is near useless as more often than not you’ll whiff and get bit. Zombies quickly become annoying and never give off the sense of horror as intended. The story also doesn’t help build any sort of tension.
Everything sort of just happens without much rhyme or reason. The outbreak happens in the science facility and there are some survivors after several hours. You are there as cleanup but the virus isn’t explained well. But later the gas explodes near a city as you bail from a helicopter carrying the virus/gas and land in a lake. This is pretty standard, but the moment you swim to shore the city has already gone to hell. No slow build, no questioning who might be infected or some sort of slow outbreak. You pull yourself onto the dock and the whole town is on fire and everyone is a zombie. Cars are overturned, houses are ransacked and not a single uninfected human is left. This happens in literal seconds of game time.
Resident Evil built up the T-virus and went to great lengths to explain how it works and how mutations take place. None of that happens here which is weird since the game it exposition-heavy in nearly every cutscene. Character dialogue is really terrible with people repeating themselves in the same scene, talking like the writer read some Shakesphere cliff notes, and with voice actors not being able to pronounce story-related names the same. There is no emotion to anything said and I can’t blame them as the writing makes me want to tear my hair out. Everything is so grandiose and stupid for people in a small town in what I think is Idaho.
Hearing one thing and reading another is not an enjoyable experience, and that’s before the sentence structure errors and poorly translated English
One problem that I have with this comes in the terrible subtitle work. I like to play games with subtitles on because I’ve turned into my parents at this point. But the subtitles in Daymare: 1998 don’t match what the voice-actors are saying. I’m not talking about a few words here or there being left out, but entire chunks of the spoken sentence. It happens so often that it gave me a headache. Hearing one thing and reading another is not an enjoyable experience, and that’s before the sentence structure errors and poorly translated English text. Thankfully there isn’t a lot of lore or documents to read. I mean, there is a lot to find, but you need to go to an actual website the documents direct you too. No thanks.
Daymare: 1998 is just overall a disappointing experience. I almost never side with big corporations but Capcom was right to shut down the RE2 remake this team was originally working on. The story is insulting, the combat is bland, reloading is jank, zombies are floaty, the voice acting should have been dropped, everyone acts stupid, checkpoints stink especially with being able to get stunk in the world, and the developer’s poor use of mental illness for some scares falls really flat. The game also isn’t that long and you can complete it in full in only a couple of hours.
Daymare: 1998 starts off with engines blazing but quickly falls apart because it’s clear this studio wasn’t up to the task of creating an original story or at least fill it with an interesting cast of characters. This is the teams first game and I can commend them for trying something this big, but It just feels like a bad fan game and that’s really the best thing I can say about it.
Daymare: 1998 feels like a bad Resident Evil 2 fan game
Final Score: 2/5
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