That gnarly chick with the minigun to the left is Alice. Alice is a therapist, albeit not a very good one. She treats people's phobias. When conventional therapeutic methods fail and her patients attempt to kill themselves or others, she "ENTERS." Their dreams, that is.As Alice, with her Psy.D and her ability to shoot fire from her dream-hands , the player has the distinct privilege of trudging through the linear levels of her clients' nightmares, battling seemingly endless hordes of the same enemies at every turn. I made it to the fourth level before I couldn't do it anymore.
Dreamkiller begins as Alice jumps into the mind of an arachnophobic, vowing to kill every goddamn spider in sight. After a short tutorial, which, if it explained the various bars on the HUD that appear to do nothing, I missed, the first spiders spawn. The controls are jumpy and oversensitive, so it took a little while for me to get used to movement (and to stop overshooting edges and falling off of levels) before I could begin roasting spiders with the power of my hands. Alice's patient is kind enough to dream up a minigun that can shoot fireballs, which makes killing spiders scores easier. Eventually, bigger spiders enter the picture. Then weird man-spider hybrids. The first level's boss is a giant man spider. This is pretty much how the whole game goes.
The client du jour is scared of something increasingly sillier than the previous one. Level two saw Alice fighting zombie worker drones (and spiders too!) on behalf of a janitor scared he would become overworked. In the third level it was a factory worker scared of machines, represented, naturally, by robot dogs. The fourth level was a chef who was scared of cold things. For whatever reason, enemies from the previous level appear in the current one. This is either laziness or a plot point. It may well be the latter: there appeared to be an attempt at a story that I will never know.
Each client dreams up some new weapon, all of which are, to the game's credit, pretty cool. There's the aforementioned minigun, the shotgun that can also turn enemies to ice, and a gun that electrocutes people. The game's press release says you eventually get a gun that shoots "good thoughts." I can't speak to that, but it sounds ridiculous.
The levels are repetitive and, oddly enough, all took me 21 minutes each. The environment is interactive for the most part. Shoot a wall and bricks fall off. It's just not absurd enough. Dreams are supposed to be bizarre. The variety in level design is disappointing. If I have to fight unending hordes of robot dogs in every new room I enter, I want it to be in a factory one minute, on the moon the next, and naked at school the next. This can happen because dreams don't have to make sense. That's a carte blanche of artist license. Instead, it's the same enemies against the same backgrounds (though, to be fair, each level is different from the last) until you get to the boss, who is just a supersized version of one of the enemies you've already faced, with way too much health.
Dreamkiller suffers from a good premise, executed poorly. Many of the game's features act as a microcosm in this way. Pressing "Q" sends a runner out of your body so that if you get stuck against too many enemies, you can teleport to where ghost Alice runs. Except that she mostly just runs into walls. Alice can also enter a "berserk" mode after getting a killing streak. All this appears to do is make her move even more quickly, at times unmanageably so. The other interesting idea is the portal to your patient's subconscious. Some enemies can only be killed in this state. You go through the portal, things turn red, you kill the enemies, you come out. Some variety.
It unsettles me that the inaugural game earns an Epic Fail, but I can't in good conscience give Dreamkiller anything higher. The gameplay is shoddy, the level design is boring, and it makes promises it can't deliver on. Blegh.
