Game Review--Dead By Daylight Mobile (Android)

"Some embrace the trials while they desperately search for a way out.  Others don't even realize they're imprisoned, and are made to relive an endless cycle of horror.  And still others lose their ability to feel or act and are flushed into the great emptiness that is The Void."

--The narrator, Dead by Daylight Mobile

Dead by Daylight's asymmetric multiplayer arrived on smartphone platforms with great controls given the limitations of the mobile version, portability that is more accessible than even the Switch version since a smartphone is more likely to be carried around, and mostly solid graphics for the "system."  Each match's four survivors have to power five generators scattered around each map to open two electronic gates--with an escape hatch that opens up under certain conditions as well.  The killer has to disable generator progress, hunt survivors, and put them on hooks so that an interdimensional being called Entity can eventually consume them.  The Entity of Dead by Daylight, as described in the opening cinematic, is an outright Lovecraftian being that can pull people out of various universes within a vaster multiverse and constantly pit the survivors against killers, with those who escape one trial only being placed in another.

Production Values

The game itself has been rather faithfully ported to the smartphone class of platforms, though the graphics predictably suffer by comparison to the Switch or TV-only consoles.  Dead by Daylight Mobile is another triumph of smartphone gaming.  It is examples like this that illustrate that console games can be brought to an unconventional platform and that handheld devices, even those not primarily crafted to play games like the Switch or PS Vita, are just a different kind of system.  The most significant issue is simply that the game crashes repeatedly and has so many severe glitches that sometimes it looks as if your character teleports across the map.  Other than this, smaller graphical or technical problems like pop-in effects for smoke or grass are the worst offenders.  Contrary to what could have easily been the case, not even the controls, which are streamlined with changes like automatic sprinting when the killer pursues a survivor, are deficient.

Gameplay

Just as the levels and aesthetic of Dead by Daylight on consoles has been directly ported to smartphones with only minor sacrifices, the controls are unusually efficient for a mobile game of this kind, with only the small size of certain icons and the rigidness of the locked pursuit mode as a killer being consistent issues.  Tapping specific icons on the touch screen drops pallets, passes skill checks while starting generators, slashes survivors, lays down bear traps, and other tasks.  Perks and add-ons modify how quickly or efficiently these actions can be completed, and they also can give special passive abilities that simplify the game for either the killer or the survivors.  For example, one of The Trapper's perks lets him reverse all generator progress by 6% once a survivor enters the dying state, and one of survivor Claudette Morel's perks lets her heal herself.

Killers run faster than survivors, yet survivors can stun them by dropping pallets and can vault away from them, and swinging a weapon, whether or not it hits a survivor, slows the killer and delays a second swing.  Survivors can take two hits without medical kits, self-healing perks, or a fellow survivor healing them; they can team up to start generators faster and to distract the killer by running in to take a blow for a teammate who is one hit away from collapsing and at the mercy of the killer, who can place them on one of many hooks to offer them to the Entity.  Still, other survivors can free them, and there is even a very small chance that they can leap off the hook on their own, but getting hooked three times automatically sacrifices them to the Entity and removes them from the match.

Finishing matches awards experience points both for a central leveling system and the individual character played, with both survivors and killers contributing to the central experience point meter that rewards players with one of the game's three special currencies.  As a mobile game, Dead by Daylight Mobile does have microtransactions, but optional microtransactions were already part of the game before it was released in its mobile format, and the daily and weekly challenges do provide additional ways to secure spendable in-game currencies.  For those who can patiently endure optional ads, extra items and a faster refresh of the mobile game's "bloodpoint" shop are both accelerated and free.  One can play Dead by Daylight Mobile without spending any actual money at all and still access quite a bit of the game even if it takes time.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

The dimension-spanning being called the Entity has pulled numerous killers and people to serve as the killers' victims from various universes in a vast multiverse that includes the worlds of Saw, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Silent Hill, and others.  The Entity hopes that the killers will offer their prey as sacrifices for it to consume the bodies and souls of, only to resurrect the dead survivors (according to the wiki, at least, as the in-game lore is very vague most of the time) and place the ones who escape in yet another trial.  In this way, the Entity has a potentially permanent supply to feed on.

Intellectual Content

That Dead by Daylight takes its lore so seriously helps lend existential gravity to the events of the game, and despite there being almost no dialogue or narrative-driven character development, the premise is thoroughly philosophical.  Since it is a multiplayer game, it is not as much of a wasted opportunity to not focus on philosophically foundational, precise, or otherwise deep ideas in the context of a detailed story, whereas this would be an enormous blunder if Dead by Daylight had a single player campaign.  By its very nature, it is supposed to be about a potentially endless cycle of torment that a multiversal being which appears to be genuinely supernatural traps people in.  This premise works very well as a match-based multiplayer game even though the in-universe and conceptual ramifications of these aspects are mostly unexplored.

Conclusion

Dead by Daylight Mobile is one of the more technically impressive mobile games, and free mobile games at that, thanks to its console-transplanted gameplay and (generally) masterful conversion to the smartphone format.  The glitches and server issues carry over as well, but the strengths of the console versions are mostly present.  Anyone more who has played Dead by Daylight on another system and has either made great progress with leveling up characters (or buying them from the game's store) or is used to console controls might not have any need to play the mobile version except to restart or to indulge in curiosity, but the efforts made to take such a game and put it on smartphones seem so generally successful--at least by this point, if not at the time of the original mobile release--that this is an ideal game for someone wanting a more substantial experience on a smartphone.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  The killers spray blood with each strike of a survivor, and blood trails can be seen as victims flee or crawl from their tormentor.