I’m pretty sure everybody in the world practically knows what Dead by Daylight is, but if you somehow haven’t heard of it before, I’ll give you a brief summary as to what it is. It is an asymmetrical multiplayer game where 4 people try to escape from a player controlled killer by repairing enough generators to power up the exit and escape the map. While at its core, the game is very fun to play initially, but the more time I sink in this game, the more problems start to crop up to the point where I almost never touch the game unless I have friends who want to play.

Pros:
+A fun game of cat and mouse

+Lots of tense moments in the first set of hours playing

Cons:
-Game is horribly imbalanced heavily favoring the survivors

-Lots of technical issues like poor optimization and framerate hitching

-Bare bones options menu with a lot of settings outright missing

-The textures look mediocre despite the visual upgrades to certain maps

-Lots of perk descriptions are extremely vague to give perks and addons a false sense of value and after almost 5 years they still refuse to change the descriptions to their actual values

-Some meta perks are tied to dlc making the game by definition pay to win. You could argue about getting them for free via the shrine of secrets, but only 2 survivor perks and 2 killer perks are on rotation on a weekly basis so the perk you want may never show up until maybe a year later.

-Gen speeds are stupidly fast for the killer to make any sort of impact on a consistent basis without having to resort to meta perks and meta killers

-The matchmaking is a complete joke as a rank 13 killer can get matched against high rank survivors

-The new UI is god awful by having all the info scattered around in every direction of the screen taking attention away from what’s in front of you. This is a clear example of applying the phrase, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”

-Practically every update will have a list of new bugs bigger than actual bug fixes

-Instead of fixing the core gameplay to make it more tolerable for both sides to play, they instead release perks that are more akin towards simple band aid fixes that counters the current meta and lock them behind a paywall whether it's by grinding a hundred hours or so or by swiping your credit card. Also, why is the field of view tied to perks i.e. Monitor & Abuse and Shadowborn instead of being tied to the options menu?

-As far as the type of game Dead by Daylight offers, they currently have no competition so therefore they don’t have to listen or care to fix and improve the game as is

-Queue times are horrendous as it takes an average of 5 to 10 minutes at around the higher ranks as a survivor, especially when playing with your friends. The game has over 30k to 50k people plus crossplay playing simultaneously and yet it takes that long to find a match. I can’t really say what it’s like as a high rank killer since they come few and far between and I’m not one of them since I personally find it frustrating to play as a killer.

-There is no incentive to really go for high ranks since there is no real reward for hitting rank 1 other than sit in a queue longer and the ranking system is extremely inconsistent in what it awards you to the point where you have to do basically everything to rank up via getting good chases, do generators, and escape, but even then you just need to pip and safety more than you depip in order to hit high ranks and it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to get there if you’re playing with friends and have at least 1 person carry you in terms of chases.

-The hit registration is blatantly bad to the point where I poke fun at it every match which is due to either bad hitboxes, latency, or a combination of both. Can someone tell me where they got their servers from?

-No new game modes or modifications to the current gameplay structure to spice up the experience and instead opts to release more $10 cosmetics to distract us from the games problems

The 4.5.0 update is practically the breaking point for me to just walk away from the game entirely as the new HUD is just unbearable to look at and the new animations make the movement feel sluggish even though the movement values are basically the same as before in addition to new bugs as usual. All they literally had to do was give us the ability to scale the old HUD or add some more customization for it, but of course long before the patch, I never really expected Behavior to really do anything competently as time and time again they usually break 20 more things for every bug fix they listed. Makes me wonder if the people that actually work on the game are underpaid interns or something. If Dead by Daylight were to be saved, it is by having another developer create a similar game that provides a better QoL and much more in order to give Dead by Daylight a competitor to force Behavior to start caring about making meaningful improvements instead of dumping more $10-$20 cosmetic bundles in the store to distract us from the game’s glaring issues. Admittedly the game is still fun from time to time when playing in short bursts, but any more than 2 hours at a time will drop my sanity to the bottom of the ocean.

So Dead or Alive 6 has been coming under fire from various fronts with missing features to the more trivial reasons I personally think is completely meaningless. While I can say I do personally enjoy my time with Dead or Alive 6, I am on the fence on whether or not I can give the game an easy recommendation. After about 46 hours of play, this is what I have to say:

Pros:
+Fighting mechanics feel responsive and fluid making a casual like me feel like I have some clue as to what I’m doing.
+Tutorial is easy to understand and can jump to any section to review.
+Command tutorials to learn all the basic combos of a specific character and are easy to pick up.
+Graphics have been enhanced from DOA5’s pc port.
+Stages all feel unique via terrain changes and stage hazards instead of being a mere backdrop change.
+Both the ladies and the gents are looking good as always.
+Roster feels pretty balanced in my opinion, but then again, I’m only a casual player.
+Online matchmaking tells you if the opponent is using wired or wireless internet.

Mixed:
+/-The new quest mode is basically a glorified tutorial, but at least it does trick you into learning the mechanics and can get a fat sum of in game currency for completing them.
+/-Story mode is a nice side activity, but all of the story events feel slapped together with no closure for most of the cast. There are no meaningful rewards to speak of, but it does have its moments where I did at least cracked a smile. It can be completed in about an hour and a half at most.
+/-There is some attempt to make character specific intros and outros, but it’s practically unfinished

Cons:
-No proper keyboard and mouse support
-Cannot rebind the keyboard controls and Team Ninja says they have no plans to even make an attempt to fix it.
-A third of the roster from DOA5 was cut. Sure, they may be mostly clone characters and guest fighters, but it still sucks to see them cut regardless.
-Tag battles are completely removed.
-No private lobbies on launch, meaning there is currently no way to play with your friends online.
-Unlocking costumes is a joke where you need to acquire a specific amount of costume points to unlock said costume, only to be greeted with another paywall with in game gold to unlock it and the base gain rate for earning costume points is just pathetic with 17-26 points for playing online, while arcade will only net you 6 points on champ difficulty and it scales for each difficulty by 1 point. Any extra points left over after completing a costume does not carry over to another costume and just vanishes into the ether. Did I forget to mention point allocation is completely random so you’re not guaranteed to get points for the character you actually play.
-Most costume unlocks are simple colour palette swaps unlike with DOA5, even if the guys had less costume choices, they are all unique unlike DOA6 has only 2 uniques with 3 palette swaps.
-The season pass is being very blatant on how much they plan on charging for dlc just like in DOA5, but I’d say it could be worse since there’s no loot box/gachapon system so at least you know exactly what you’re getting.

Despite the game’s missing features, ludicrous costume grind, and the $60 price tag, Dead or Alive 6 is a solid fighting game with easy to understand tutorials and responsive controls making the game easy to pick up and enjoy. I believe the only reason why I wouldn’t recommend DOA6 is the missing lobby system, but even if it’s added in later, there should have been no excuse to not include it on launch day despite the game being delayed for 2 weeks after the original launch date.

As a little side note, if we ever get to place in a vote for a new guest character, my vote is on Kazuma Kiryu since he’s been rejected from Tekken 7.