A bunch of smarmy teenagers with ridiculous haircuts trying to escape the gloved clutches of an alien race of clowns is the kind of absurd and cheesy premise that makes perfect fodder for the asymmetrical multiplayer horror genre. Following in the footsteps of Friday the 13th, Evil Dead, and many more licensed games, the 1988 cult classic film Killer Klowns from Outer Space is the latest horror movie to try its hand at stealing our still-beating hearts with high-stakes murder sports – and it largely succeeded at capturing mine. The chaotic, unabashedly goofy competitive matches had me and my crew screaming with delight round after round, as we turned each other into cotton candy ornaments and popped one another’s red noses. The silly rounds of mayhem do lack variety and eventually begin to feel as shallow as the graves you’ll dig for your victims, which can make the good times fairly short-lived, but the 25 hours I got out of it before hitting that wall were quite memorable indeed.
Bucking the traditional asymmetrical structure slightly, each match pits seven hapless humans against three killers, as opposed to the usual four on one you see in most games that followed in Dead by Daylight’s bloody footsteps. The Klowns are preposterously over the top, and run around turning humans into sacks of cotton candy with ray guns, hunting teens using a balloon hound on a leash, and mowing terrified victims down with an invisible car. It’s truly some of the zaniest stuff I’ve seen in a multiplayer game in a long time, and it never fails to make me laugh. I especially appreciate the little details, like how the Klowns’ shoes make a comical squeak when you walk, alerting everyone nearby to your presence and leaving cartoonish boot prints all over the floor.
Admittedly, it’s nowhere near as much fun to play as a human because they’re just not as original or goofy as their pursuers. You mostly just sneak around searching for weapons, keys, gas canisters, and other things they need to mount an escape. However, getting away does have a novel twist, because none of the rescue options will allow more than three of the seven teens to leave at once. The boat can be repaired, but only fits three people, while the bridge exit is so rickety it could collapse after it’s been crossed by just two (if they’re not slow and careful as they’re crossing it).
During my time in these outlandish bouts, this led to several hilarious and tense interactions where someone on our team would panic and use up one of the exits to escape a dicey situation alone, leaving the remaining survivors in a lurch. Because there’s only four or five possible exits on each of the five maps, that makes evacuation for the remaining six humans a lot more difficult, and you don’t wanna be that person.
Amusing minigames let humans stay engaged even after they’ve completed their role in a match.
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It’s also cool that if a human gets killed or manages to get out of Dodge early on, they’re given the option to play a series of simple but amusing carnival-themed minigames, like Whack-a-Klown or a Simon Says memorization game. By completing these, they’re able to help out their remaining teammates with items to improve their chances, like health, weapons, or even a keycard they might need to escape through one of the exits. I’ve never seen something like this implemented in the genre before, and it’s a great way to keep you engaged after you’ve completed your role in the match – especially if you’ve got survivor’s guilt after taking one of the exits for yourself and leaving the others to fend for themselves.
It’s because of things like this that, even though Killer Klowns borrows a whole heck of a lot from the asymmetrical horror games that came before it, it doesn’t feel like an immediately dull carbon copy with yet another cult horror movie’s skin draped over it. Aside from the macabre humor, the biggest shakeup is that, with a full 10-player match, there’s a whole lot more action happening around the map at all times. As a human, you might find yourself coordinating with a small group of survivors to repair a boat and make an escape, while another posse across the map stages a daring rescue attempt to free an ally that’s been cocooned in cotton candy and is slowly being turned into Klown juice. Meanwhile, as a Klown, you might find yourself hunting down and killing a teenager hiding in a porta-potty, while elsewhere your two allies are collecting cotton candy to power their Klown machines in order to trigger the Klownpocalypse and win the match.
Compare that to a single bad guy slowly stalking the halls trying to kill everyone and Killer Klowns feels a lot more chaotic and casually enjoyable, which fits pretty appropriately with its silly-as-heck vibe. With so much going on in every match, the vast majority of them end with at least a few humans making a successful escape, while the Klowns almost always get at least a few kills in, which makes things feel a lot less sweaty since it’s not so all or nothing.
It feels a lot more chaotic and casual compared to a single bad guy slowly stalking the halls.
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Another way Killer Klowns achieves this is in how effectively humans are able to fight back (and even kill Klowns relatively easily) once they find the right weapons. A solo Klown chasing a squad of four humans is likely to be in quite a pickle once those teens realize they can just turn around and wail on the grinning goof with axes and baseball bats until it’s forced to spend a minute in timeout before respawning. And there’s no carnival games for you to play, silly Klown! But because Klowns don’t have to loot to be powerful, don’t run out of ammo, and only die temporarily, there’s still a ton of reasons for humans to fear their wacky assailants, especially since ammo is scarce and human weapons break after just a few swings.
This means that both sides, Klowns and humans, have to work with their teammates to achieve victory consistently, and whichever side forms a more cohesive unit is likely to win. That’s exactly what I want in a game like this, and it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s an all too common problem for asymmetrical games to become one-sided fights when it’s a single baddie versus a group of survivors. But in Killer Klowns nobody can really go it alone, and I’ve seen a lot more close matches and interesting interactions than I’d usually expect as a result.
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Although the tug-o-war between Klowns and humans is pretty nicely balanced overall, there is one major misstep with it: While humans are given multiple ways to learn about and navigate the map as they find an escape, like compasses they can loot that will point them in the direction of the exits, Klowns have no easy way to identify those areas. This means that unless the Klowns get a lucky spawn and wind up near one or two of the exits, they can spend quite a lot of time running around blindly wondering where players ran off to. This is especially painful for newcomers who don’t understand the maps yet and have an even tougher time figuring out where players might be headed. After the first few minutes of a match, when Klowns will have hopefully found a few exits and gained the ability to instantly jump to any point on the map they’ve already discovered, it becomes a lot more of an even fight – but early on the humans have a huge advantage and often find ways to escape before the Klowns even spot them.
As yet another ongoing game you’re expected to play a whole lot of, Killer Klowns has unlockables earned by playing matches, including both cosmetic stuff for pure flair and new character classes and abilities that can have a very real impact in-game. You can get the beefy Tank Klown class that has health to spare, or the small but mighty Brawler, who moves in quickly and uses boxing gloves to knock the snot out of any annoying adolescents. Meanwhile, the humans unlock different archetypes with names like Rebellious and Tough that mostly play the same, differentiated only by some simple stats that might make one person have more stamina while another does more damage with melee weapons. Unlocking the various Klown classes helped inject some variety into my time, and most of them feel great. My favorite is the Tracker Klown, who is an expert at sniffing out slippery earthlings and turning them into spools of sugar with his shotgun.
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Unfortunately, all the gameplay-altering stuff can be unlocked after just a handful of hours (depending on how well you’re doing), and after getting a feel for each of them, things become pretty predictable – and therein lies Killer Klowns’ biggest shortcoming. Each of the five maps has a different layout to learn, but all the exits are the same; there’s always a boat in need of fuel and a spark plug, and there’s always a bridge or tunnel exit that requires a melee weapon and a gate key to pass through, so playing as a human never has any variety to it. As a Klown, you’re always just guarding exits, collecting cotton candy cocoons, and killing teens, so your role remains similarly unchanged every match. After 10+ hours, when everyone I was playing with understood the map layouts and all the possible exits, things began to feel pretty repetitive as we started to run out of ways to keep the fun alive.
That’s a major problem for a multiplayer game that only has one game mode and that you’re supposed to be interested in grinding endlessly. There’s certainly plenty of room to keep honing your skills as a human or Klown, learning to dominate those with inferior map knowledge or combat prowess, but that climb becomes a bit monotonous after you’ve seen the same map 50 times and have repeated the same escape/murdering mechanics ad nauseam. It would be great if more maps, game modes, Klown/human character classes, or alternate escape options were thrown into the mix to revitalize things – here’s hoping developer Illfonic is eyeing those kinds of updates in the near future, but for now I found my interest waning after just a week.
