A short and sweet horror game clearly inspired by the original Resident Evil games. NoD tasks you against escaping from some nightmare. You start in a Manor and from there, you can clearly see it's RE inspiration. You've got the health status and inventory in similar vein and you've got the classic zombie dodging strategy of shooting them in the head to stagger them for a bit. However, while this game seems to call itself an "action-horror" game, don't take it so literally. You will be scraping by for ammo if you try to kill everything as the zombies are quite tanky, just like old RE. Over the course of the campaign, you'll be solving puzzles that'll have you venturing around the Manor and its many floors and you'll find new weapons along the way. You start off with a pistol which is pretty weak as zombies almost take an entire clip to the face to be killed (unless a random crit occurs, where you will be greeted with the zombie's head exploding into a red mist) and should only be used to stun them so you can run past them. You'll find a shotgun which is your best method of outright killing most enemies as they will die in 1-2 close range headshots and lastly, you'll find a magnum revolver which you'll find very little ammo for, and for good reason because this gun wipes the floor with the majority of the enemies. To be more accurate with these guns, you have to stand still and wait for the crosshair to tighten up, so don't expect to be running around popping quick point-blank headshots with a shotgun like it's Doom 3.
The atmosphere is also well done with a sense of dread always lurking in the long halls of the Manor and the clenching suspense of entering a new room as the screen fades to black as you transition into the room, hoping you are not greeted by a zombie on the other side, or worse.
It'll probably take the average player around 2-3 hours to finish the campaign, maybe even quicker if the player doesn't investigate every corner, but where's the fun in that? After you beat the game you'll have a few optional game modes to play around with like a horde mode, a in built randomizer, and a randomly generated dungeon crawler mode. So there's quite a bit of content to mess around with for the price.
However, there are four annoyances I had with this game. The first being your stamina, as it drains after 3 seconds of running and with the amount of backtracking for the many puzzles, it can get a bit tedious having to wander to rooms that are far away from each other at a slow pace because your character has the endurance of an old man with back problems. The second annoyance is how your character is pathetic at handling firearms. I don't know which survival horror game started the trend where your character has to be hopeless at handling guns but it needs to die. Your character slows to a crawl when slowly reloading and even pumping a shotgun, so it can be a pain in the ass to lose a health state because your character slowed down while pumping a shotgun. The third annoyance are the bosses. These types of game are not known for having good boss fights, and NoD doesn't do anything to change them. You've got bosses that'll rush you without hesitation, where your petty stamina bar will let you down so you'll never get away (the Meat Golem), you've got bosses that will instantly kill you upon hit (the chainsaw psycho), you've got boss arenas that are too small to fight in (the Giant Spider) and you've got a final boss where the traditional survival-horror gunplay doesn't mesh well with (Lord of the Nightmare). The last annoyance are these fucking hitscanning Cultists. I'd expect enemies like this in a game like Blood, not a survival horror game inspired by classic RE. The developer even had to nerf them because players had such a hard time dealing with them as the developer designed them to function like the HECU Marines in Half-Life as they run for cover and flank you like it's a completely different game. Yeah... not surprising why this combination doesn't mix well.
Overall despite its four annoyances I had briefly, it's still an easy recommendation, if you are a big fan of classic survival horror games, Nightmare of Decay will satisfy you. Just don't expect it to be very long.
The atmosphere is also well done with a sense of dread always lurking in the long halls of the Manor and the clenching suspense of entering a new room as the screen fades to black as you transition into the room, hoping you are not greeted by a zombie on the other side, or worse.
It'll probably take the average player around 2-3 hours to finish the campaign, maybe even quicker if the player doesn't investigate every corner, but where's the fun in that? After you beat the game you'll have a few optional game modes to play around with like a horde mode, a in built randomizer, and a randomly generated dungeon crawler mode. So there's quite a bit of content to mess around with for the price.
However, there are four annoyances I had with this game. The first being your stamina, as it drains after 3 seconds of running and with the amount of backtracking for the many puzzles, it can get a bit tedious having to wander to rooms that are far away from each other at a slow pace because your character has the endurance of an old man with back problems. The second annoyance is how your character is pathetic at handling firearms. I don't know which survival horror game started the trend where your character has to be hopeless at handling guns but it needs to die. Your character slows to a crawl when slowly reloading and even pumping a shotgun, so it can be a pain in the ass to lose a health state because your character slowed down while pumping a shotgun. The third annoyance are the bosses. These types of game are not known for having good boss fights, and NoD doesn't do anything to change them. You've got bosses that'll rush you without hesitation, where your petty stamina bar will let you down so you'll never get away (the Meat Golem), you've got bosses that will instantly kill you upon hit (the chainsaw psycho), you've got boss arenas that are too small to fight in (the Giant Spider) and you've got a final boss where the traditional survival-horror gunplay doesn't mesh well with (Lord of the Nightmare). The last annoyance are these fucking hitscanning Cultists. I'd expect enemies like this in a game like Blood, not a survival horror game inspired by classic RE. The developer even had to nerf them because players had such a hard time dealing with them as the developer designed them to function like the HECU Marines in Half-Life as they run for cover and flank you like it's a completely different game. Yeah... not surprising why this combination doesn't mix well.
Overall despite its four annoyances I had briefly, it's still an easy recommendation, if you are a big fan of classic survival horror games, Nightmare of Decay will satisfy you. Just don't expect it to be very long.