The Crisis Zone

Genre: First-Person Horror

Players: 1

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Review:

The Crisis Zone is a First-Person Horror Game released in 2023 on PC and Nintendo Switch. This game puts you in the role of a man whose helicopter crashed in a snowy area with an abandoned military facility, where you must find a way to evade or stun enemies long enough to work out a way to leave the area without getting killed.

The Crisis Zone uses unimpressive low-poly 3D visuals to depict its snow-covered world at sunset, and the various dangerous monsters and flying killer drones you’ll encounter. There is no music, and the main sound you’ll hear is the unconvincing crunch of your feet in the snow, though these will be joined by the monster’s sounds when they spot you, and your own character’s poorly-acted voice when he wants to think out loud.

Your character doesn’t get any sort of introduction or story, you’re just a random guy whose helicopter crashed in a quarantined area. Why they even have your character talk is an odd choice, as he is otherwise a blank slate.

In that way, the game seems to be aiming to be something akin to the Slenderman games, in that you can’t fight, but must hoof it around a large enclosed area looking for helpful items to pick up or tasks you need to complete while enemies stalk the area and will take up chase if they do see you. Players can also opt to use spare parts to fix up walking robots you can use to protect yourself if an area is too heavily-stalked by monsters to sneak your way through.

It’s not a terrible formula, but unfortunately it’s undone by some pretty terrible movement when the terrain isn’t flat, which is often, as you’re in an area with a lot of hilly and mountainous terrain, and plenty of reason to want to hug that terrain to stay out of the path of monsters… but doing so means your character will shudder and seem stuck on the terrain.

The game also frequently doesn’t visually indicate when an item is something you can interact with, meaning you’ll repeatedly be trying to interact with stuff that’s just scenery. Also, I had enemies detect me through walls and even kill me through a wall, so the notion of stealth here seems utterly broken. Which is pretty bad in a game where stealth is a huge element of the gameplay.

Finally, this is a Horror game… where the monsters just aren’t all that scary. Maybe it’s the brightly-lit area you’re moving through, or the low-poly character models, or character designs that just don’t seem terribly menacing… but whatever it is, this game just doesn’t bring the scares.

In the end, The Crisis Zone has some interesting ideas about a dangerous setting and the monsters that may be stalking about that setting, as well as a way to use your own machines to fend off enemies. Unfortunately, the execution of those ideas is wrong in numerous ways. Poor in-game physics, enemies that aren’t scary, and an emphasis on stealth and item-collecting when both of those mechanics are broken in one way or another. As a result, this is a Horror game I simply cannot recommend.

tl;dr – The Crisis Zone is a First-Person Horror Game where players take the role of a survivor of a helicopter crash in an abandoned military facility filled with monsters and killer drone robots. The premise is sound, and there’s an interesting robot-repairing mechanic, but the Stealth, Horror, and item-gathering elements all have hefty problems here, and with those being the main focus of the game, the result is a game I don’t recommend.

Grade: D

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