I first saw the first Friday the 13th film when I was twelve years old. It was a rainy Friday night in October, and while may be unwise to confess this to future employers it sparked a deep love of slasher films for me. So much so that not only have I combed over the entire Lexicon of the classics, I’ve even gone abroad to see things like Cold Prey and Frontiers. Somewhere in my old house, there’s a few boxes of VHS of home made slasher films my friends and I pumped out over a summer! Ones where a group of teenagers who are too young to drive are stranded in the middle of their neighborhood. Thankfully I think those buried treasures may be lost to time.

So when I first heard talk of Summer Camp: Volume 1, a kickstarter project by a group of similar slasher fans seeking to transplant the genre to video games, it’s needless to say I was fairly excited. When it was revealed that they had secured the license to Friday the 13th, well if my twelve year old self had known this, I may instead just be waking from an eleven year old coma!

Friday the 13th: The Game, harkens back to the heyday of the slasher titan they even included that terrible “The Game” subtitle. Maybe they didn’t want anyone to confuse it with the NES game by Atlus? Friday the 13th: The Game, pits you as either one of seven hapless camp counselors or as the goalie himself, Jason Voorhees. The objective is fairly simple, either Jason crashed your party and is killing you all and it’s time to escape, or your mom noticed some teenagers are drinking pot, doing beer and smoking sex and it’s time to go kill them all.

The core concept is simple but executed with a deft hand. As one of the teenagers you have three options to try and escape the clutches of the Voorhees clan. Two vehicles that require repairs or a phone box that needs a fuse so you can call the police and wait for them to save you! The games three maps are all rather large and use a hint of procedural generation in what vehicles spawn, where they spawn, and most importantly; where the things you need to fix them spawn. To boil the game down to it’s most core elements, as a councilor at least is to say it’s a scavenger hunt mixed with a harrowing game of hide and go seek. And it works, it works brilliantly being all alone, hearing the iconic “Ki-Ki-Ki-Ma-Ma-Ma” as you creep from cabin to cabin, just trying to find those damn car keys!

Jason’s side of the game is also a wonderful venture into sadism. As you, goaded on by the voice of your mother, hunt down the teens one by one. Laying traps, tossing knives at them, grabbing them for some deftly animated and brutal finishing moves all fan favorites from the films.

Fan favorite is a term that can easily be applied to the game as a whole (or is that The Game.) The development team recruited favorite Jason actor Kane Hodder to do mo-cap work for Jason, Tom Savini to oversee gore effects and design a currently backer exclusive Jason, and Thom Matthews to reprise his role as the closest thing Friday the 13th has to a hero; Tommy Jarvis, who can be called via radio by one of the teens and serves as a one time buffed up re-spawn for either a dead or escaped councilor. The game’s three maps are loving recreations of the films first 3 locales, as is each of the Jasons, brimming with great little details. So as a love letter to the fans of this series, it’s phenomenal! Unfortunately it’s not just a love letter; it’s also a video game priced at $39.99 USD.

By the time this review goes up, it will likely already be a well worn meme that Friday the 13th had launch issues. Of course launch issues for almost any game are understandable. Video games are large and intricate, with millions of pieces working in conjunction. So if QA misses a certain texture bug that only occurs on Saturday the 14th on a full moon during an odd year, that’s fine. What’s not fine is the state this game was released in. Constant crashes, and dreadful netcode that can see one waiting upwards of twenty minutes to find a match. And even if you do find a match there’s no promise you won’t be swiftly ejected by the game’s archaic P2P connection, which hinge the entire server on the chosen host. In short, if the host is out, you’re out! Maybe they should’ve delayed it until the gimmick date in October.

There’s also the matter of the game’s longevity and ability to be creative with its updates. Comparisons to Behavior Interactive’s Dead by Daylight are inevitable (in fact current rumors are swirling that DBD’s upcoming console release pressured the Friday the 13th devs into pushing the game out the door faster.) Both are horror focused, asymmetrical multiplayer games with a love for slasher films. However Dead by Daylight’s lack of adherence to any one license opens it up creatively. A good variety of different killers haunting a variety of different maps (and even guest appearances by Michael Meyers, and Laurie Strode of Halloween and Bill Overbeck of Left 4 Dead fame) all with unique presentations. Friday the 13th pales in comparison to that. While it’s 3 summer camp maps are large and lovingly crafted; they are still 3 summer camps. Log cabins and lakes shoulder to shoulder. Similarly while each Jason has a distinct visual style and some modest gameplay tweaks between them, they are all still Jason. No matter if it’s a burlap sack or a hockey mask you’re still the lumbering Mister Voorhees with the same powers and same strategy every game. Maybe Jason would have better served as a guest character in Summer Camp: Volume 1 rather than the star of his own game.

At the end of the day I have a hard time recommending Friday the 13th: The Game to all but the most faithful of Jason fans. At the same time however I have a very hard time not recommending the game to those same faithful. $39.99 USD is a steep price tag to drop on a game that still feels like it’s in early access, with no promises of further updates. The best advice I can give is to instead drop a few bucks on a couple of the Friday the 13th movies (1,4, 6 and 7 being my personal recommendations) and see how much they speak to you. If you’re still hungry after that, then maybe it’s time to pay Jason a visit in this medium. Just make sure you don’t accidentally buy the NES version.