If you frequent any game site I’m sure you’ve come across news in the past about The Flock, a multiplayer horror game that’s now out. Because checking off the boxes for “multiplayer” and “horror game” aren’t enough, it also features a gimmick where each player death will tick down a global counter. The idea is that once the massive pool of lives is spent the game will cease to work since there won’t be any lives left to use to respawn. It’s definitely an interesting idea, thinking about the death of your game before it’s even alive, but the confidence of this idea doesn’t match how uninspired the game itself actually is.
The Flock
Developer: Vogelsap
Price: $17
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
So in the world of The Flock some sort of apocalyptic event has happened and you play as a monster of the Flock. Your goal is simple: grab the mysterious light artifact to transform into a carrier and stay alive as long as possible. Only one player can be the carrier and the other players basically stalk the carrier until they see an opportunity to attack and claim the artifact for themselves. You’d think being able to sprint crazy fast and jump super high would have you feeling pretty powerful but it’s actually quite the opposite for two good reasons: when you’re hit by the carrier’s beam of light you’ll instantly crumble to dust if you’re close enough and the controls are clunky as hell . Standing still turns you into stone, thus invulnerable to the light, but your vision is limited and moving out of “stone mode” is a bit awkward. The instant you stop moving you enter this frozen state and getting out of it is feels really janky; jumping around can be slightly annoying at times too since there’s no way to latch onto edges or climb up walls so you’re always fumbling around trying to climb structures. Because running and jumping like a drunk agent from Crackdown wasn’t enough Flock can also create decoys to use as bait, or to teleport back to if you get in a sticky situation. Flock can also let loose a screech that, if performed by every other Flock player, will give everyone a nice buff and reveals the location of the Flock players to each other. It’s an interesting mechanic that requires cooperation between all these players who are actively competing against each other. I also like the idea behind starting as the hunter and working your way to becoming the hunted.
When you eventually kill a carrier a flash of light will transform you into the very thing you sought to destroy. As the carrier you have to find beacons and activate them with your light to score points. Playing as the carrier kind of sucks though; it isn’t scary in the slightest and once you become the carrier winning is hilariously easy unless you royally suck at the game. It’s also here where the game becomes incredibly repetitive due to there being absolutely no variety in the objectives you have to perform. There’s only one objective which is shining your light at a beacon then moving on to the next one and after a handful of matches it all starts to get a bit tiresome. There’s not really much else to the game and the entire thing feels really trite once you realize this.
The game only having three maps, that aren’t even very original or interesting to look at, doesn’t help things either and it just isn’t that fun to play after you realize each match plays out the exact same way. The lack of game modes and maps means you’ll know the best way to play each map pretty quickly and it removes any sort of tension when you know what spots Flock players will try to get at you from. If I experience everything there is to your game within the first five minutes playing it then what’s the point in me continuing to play it? Its ridiculous $17 entry fee is just way too much for something that’s expecting you to repeat the same boring process ad nauseam.
Vogelsap should be given props for coming up with a really neat experiment for a multiplayer game but the small online community means this game will likely never come close to ever reaching its endpoint. The game launches with this laughable 215 million number that’s likely never going to have a decent dent put into it and the fact that the game couldn’t even slip into Steam’s player count stat page shows that this experiment failed before it really took off. Nobody who pays for this game will even live long enough to see the grand payoff this game is selling to them. So here you have this incredibly bland, repetitive game with an interesting gimmick but now your gimmick is worthless because your player base will never get big enough for it to do what it was made to do.
The Final Word
It’s so frustrating playing a game with such an interesting premise that fails to capitalize on its potential. The Flock is unfortunately doomed to be one of those games people put in their “Wasted Potential” lists.
– MonsterVine Rating: 2 out of 5 – Poor
