REVIEW: 'FNaF World'

....I have no idea where to start with this one.

This is almost certainly the worst game I've reviewed yet. I'm sorry if I'm giving away my final verdict, but how this usually works is that I plan my conclusion first then try to work out why I came to it. Sometimes I don't need to play for long before reaching a verdict and being able to adequately describe how I came to it, like Volume for instance. Other times, I have to work through the entire game to find enough material. It took at least 30 hours of gameplay before I was able to write what I thought of Skyrim. I'm still no-where close to a review of Dark Souls yet.

This game isn't bad in the Battlefront sense: functional but abhorrent. It's not bad in the Kholat sense where the game could have potentially been good but was let down. It's bad in the Unturned sense. It's broken, incompetent, un-thought-out, and pointless. It does not have any need to exist, and the fact that it does exist only serves to blight humanity. It's the wasp of gaming.

OK. FNaF World means Five Night's at Freddy's World. Yes, that Five Night's at Freddy's. The one with all the jump-scares and men screaming effeminately at it on YouTube. But this game isn't a horror. It's a turn-based 2D JRPG similar to the old school Final Fantasy games and the recent Undertale - and I would like to apologise for daring to mention Undertale in the same sentence as FNaF World. This game wishes it was Undertale, but fails because Undertale actually had a single cell of brainpower behind it. My puppy could create a game that evokes Undertale better, and she still tries to eat her own poo.

I thought this was a joke. The way the game takes such a horror-focused series and 're-imagines' it as such an overly-happy, cheaply made product. This can't be serious, surely? I was waiting to see if there would be a dark twist, or at least some kind of punchline. That, or I thought it was a spin-off by another developer. Perhaps a cheap flash game made by a fan? Nope: it's by Scott, the maker of all four previous FNaF games. It's a legitimate effort, and Scott seems genuinely sorry that it's turned out so awful. Unless, again, this is a joke and Scott is dragging it out.

The 'plot,' if you can call it such, is that apparently there's another world behind the world you're currently in, and monsters are coming out of it. I have no idea what the world that you're supposed to be saving actually is. Apparently it's inhabited by animatronic freaks who you play as, and you talk to other freaks. We're not even given so much as a name. Later we're informed that there's a glitch leading into the 'other world' so - wait! Do these people know they're in a game? Are they part of some digital network? Have they been sucked into the Matrix? Who are we? Why are we here? What does any of this have to do with haunting the world's unluckiest yet most dedicated to his job security guard?

The exposition itself needs to be re-written. The dialogue emulates typical JRPG's in the sense that it reads like it's been directly translated from Japanese. None of it sounds natural. It reads like a person who's never played a game before has been asked to write game dialogue. Occasionally characters try to be witty, which backfires worse than open mic night at the retirement home. And despite having whole paragraphs of text dumped on me at once...I still had no idea what was going on. Why does a FNaF game need dialogue? Why does this exist? 

The gameplay is worthy of such a great story...in that it's awful too. You alter between the retro-styled overworld and the pathetic attempt at turn-based combat. The overworld is almost uncontrollable, and you're locked on a really fiddly axis. I kept bumping into trees despite being no-where near the trees. There seems to be a delay in moving from one direction to the other, and recently a 'map' screen was added but I can't make much sense of it. You can talk to people, but they give absolutely no clue as to what you're buying/trading.

Not that it matters, since 'tokens' are abundant because every few steps you'll get jumped by enemies and forced into the combat. Recent years has seen a decline in turn-based combat, with developers forgetting what 'turn-based' means. These days your expected to sift through menus, swap party members, equip items, prepare combos, manage turn-orders all whilst the battle plays out in real-time. It's like playing Pokemon whilst a drone-strike's in progress.

FNaF World is no exception, but it's even worse here. There is no indication of turn-order, only a vague indication of what effects are currently on your party, and no cooldown. You can spam your most powerful attacks with no repercussion. After going up just one level and finding just one powerup, suddenly the enemies in the first area presented absolutely no challenge whatsoever. I was able to wipe out an entire screen with just two power-attacks. The later enemies also only get slightly stronger, meaning just spamming a few power-attacks would still be able to down them all.

The most annoying feature is how a random loading screen keeps popping up. You want to talk to someone, the dialogue screen opens. You want to buy something, the shop screen opens. That's fine. But when you exit out of it, for some reason you have to wait for a loading screen as though we're playing on a Commodore 64. This isn't a high-tech game! I can run BioShock Infinite on ultra. Why does everything I do need to load? Why does this exist? 


The visual style alternates between retro and modern 3D. The retro somehow looks worse than actual retro games, but at least there's a clear art-style going on. I have absolutely no idea what any of the enemies you have to fight are. The first area is an assortment of tree-monster things that look dreadful and are forgotten about immediately. Compares to the animatronics in the previous games, which were inspired, there is no visual direction to this at all. In fact, there's no direction for anything. I tried to see Scott's thought-process behind this, but I wasn't able to find enough paint to sniff.

When you go into the alternate world...dear god. The screen has a filter on it where you can barely make out what's going on. Whilst you don't have to go to this dimension often, when you do you'll be given a headache within a few mins. Disappointingly, there's also no encounters here, so we miss a chance to actually fight something interesting.

I feel sick...

I suppose this was a long time coming. The FNaF games have been declining in quality, with Scott churning four out within the space of just over a year. I commented in my review of Five Night's at Freddy's 4 (in which you don't go to Freddy's for any nights) that the game felt rushed out and should've been delayed until such time as it was polished enough to be worth our money. That feels like such a naive observation in comparison to this. Oooh, you're complaining about fullscreen support, Max? Dodgy volume levels? The game not working with FRAPS so you can't take screenshots and have to grab some from Steam like a hack reviewer? Well just you wait until the next game. You'll be begging for FNaF 4 again, even though you didn't like it and don't really have much investment in this franchise.

I spent the whole time playing this game shaking my head, not believing what I was seeing. This is not even worthy to be a free flash game. The only praise I have for the game is that the 'Escape' key still immediately closes the game, but whilst in the previous games this was a useful feature for when the horror became too much, this is for when you become overwhelmed by how terrible the game is. I was lying at the start: this is a horror game - just a very different kind.

This is the worst game that I've ever paid money for. FNaF World is currently the same price as Portal. I've perhaps played worse games, but they were either free games, cheap £1 games from bins, or gifts from parents/relatives who didn't know any better. Thank GabeN for Steam Refund...