RetroRealms: Halloween

Genre: Action-Platformer

Players: 1, Online Leaderboards

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in RetroRealms Double Feature: Halloween and Ash vs Evil Dead, along with RetroRealms: Ash vs Evil Dead.)

The RetroRealms series of games from developer WayForward Technologies and publisher Boss Team Games has been designed with the goal of creating retro-style Action-Platformers based on classic movie franchises while connecting these games through the franchise’s “RetroRealms Arcade”, a First-Person virtual arcade where you can peruse the games you’ve acquired and check out bonus content you’ve unlocked by playing the games. Players are also being enticed by having games in the series players acquire unlock characters and content hidden in other games in the series.

You can see this in action in the first two (and as of this writing, only) games in the series – RetroRealms: Halloween, and RetroRealms: Ash vs Evil Dead, where players who purchase both games can play each game’s protagonist in the other, making use of different abilities and seeing a different version of that game’s story play out.

By default, Halloween has you playing the film franchise’s knife-wielding antagonist, Michael Meyers, who is sleeping in an insane asylum when he is approached by an inter-dimensional being calling itself The Overlord, who entices Meyers to murder his way out of the asylum and beyond to further its own plot, and gifts Meyers one of its magic eyeballs to assist in this task.

It’s an interesting premise, but the game that results is a pretty standard Action-Platformer where players can unlock additional moves throughout the game and can use the aforementioned eyeball to temporarily shift over to a viscera-covered dark dimension where enemies and pathways differ somewhat from the normal world. This element is handled in a clunky manner, with players only able to enter and exit this realm while standing and not moving, and unable to swap back again until a second or two has passed. This clunkiness extends to other parts of the gameplay, such as a downward aerial attack that I found to be extremely unreliable, as well as hit detection that seemed a bit iffy at times.

Also, the added content you get from owning both games seems pretty weak. Yes, the dialogue between characters is different, but the game overall remains largely the same regardless of which character you’re using, with “good” characters like Ash from the Evil Dead franchise simply having human enemies either replaced with possessed monstrous versions of those same humans, or swapped out with wooden crates so you don’t have odd situations where the good guys are murdering their way through innocent people that Michael Meyers tears through in his version of the campaign. Plus, the different abilities of these characters don’t make them play drastically differently either – for example, Michael Meyers can use his charge attack to dash and Ash can use his to fire a shotgun, but the move set of the two characters is otherwise mostly the same.

At the very least, the presentation here is good,, with detailed pixel art visuals with good animation, and buckets of blood splashing all over and even dripping down the screen at times. In addition, the game’s synthesized soundtrack fits the carnage well, and makes good use of the well-known Halloween theme music.

However, unless you’re a fan of the franchise it’s derived from, I can’t see myself recommending RetroRealms: Halloween to you. It’s mostly a competent Action-Platformer, but not a great one. And the promising cross-compatibility between different games in the series doesn’t amount to very much. Unless the main reason you’re getting this is to play as Michael Meyers (or whatever other RetroRealms characters you’ve unlocked), I suggest you go for one of numerous other better games in the genre.

tl;dr – RetroRealms: Halloween is an Action-Platformer based on the Halloween horror franchise and promising the potential to swap in content from other RetroRealms games you’ve bought. However, the game itself is merely decent, not great, and the extra features you can unlock aren’t worth the hype. Unless you’re a huge fan of the source material, you should stick to better games in the genre.

Grade: C+

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