Dead by Daylight is an intensely difficult game to review, at least from my perspective. Despite how many hours I have in the game, I’ve never felt that I really had a good way to communicate my feelings on it. I think Dead by Daylight is an extremely fun game, but it’s also basically the only game of its kind that has had any longevity, which somewhat muddies the waters as to whether or not a competent competitor would sour my opinion of the game.

As I mentioned, a big part of this confusion I feel around Dead by Daylight (DBD) comes from its position as the sole asymmetric PVP game of its kind to have a consistently large player base and a consistent stream of new content and updates. Many other games have come and gone that've tried to do what DBD does, but barring one exception they’ve all swiftly lost players and been abandoned by their developers. Hide or Die, Evolve, Deathgarden: Bloodharvest, Video Horror Society, Home Sweet Home: Survive, and so on. Some of these games technically still exist and the servers aren’t shut down, but if you take a look at the player count for either of these games it seems unlikely that they’ll be making a comeback anytime soon. Many of these games had a large amount of potential in their gameplay and concepts. Hide or Die comes to mind for me as it was an exceptionally janky game with an equally confusing identity and core concept, yet was a very fun game to play before the servers were shut down. Evolve was a somewhat poor execution of the asymmetric concept, but with the triple-A production values behind it, it had the potential to thrust the genre into the mainstream. Deathgarden was literally made by the same company as DBD, Behavior Interactive, yet they still couldn’t recapture the popularity of DBD.

To put it simply, as far as I’m aware DBD is the only currently playable asymmetric PVP game of its kind. DBD is by no means terrible, but I think that fact makes it difficult to really compare to other products. Despite all this, I think I would recommend DBD. The game is strange and at times unbalanced, but it’s updated fairly frequently and as long as you understand the flaws inherent in the genre, and don’t take the game too seriously, you can have a lot of fun playing it, no matter your skill level or number of DLCs.