This is a game that has become notorious for its easy gamerscore, but is it actually any good? Good horror games are hard to find these days, and sometimes an easy gamerscore horror game can deliver a compelling horror experience (such as The Park, The Town of Light or both Layers of Fear games). DYING : Reborn is kinda like an Asylum Studios horror movie production, however. It rips off well-known horror tropes, and it does not even bother to deliver what made those tropes so popular to begin with.
This is a blatant rip-off of the Saw torture porn trope. It has no shortage of moments that should have had me reeling in disgust at what was happening in the game. However, the extremely poor production values kept me from getting involved in the shoddy plot on display here. There are bugs that broke the game and made me restart a chapter a couple of times during the two hours I played this. The graphics would have looked shoddy even on the first generation of XBox consoles. And the voice acting is incredibly exceptional (and I do not mean that in a positive way).
Fans of well-made video games should avoid this like the plague. However, if one wanted a few laughs at the expense of a bargain-bin game, DYING : Reborn certainly delivers on that front. I did manage to laugh out loud at many of the scenes I played through. I know this game is crap, but it has more genuine laughs in it than many games that are trying to make the player laugh. Just don't expect it to make any sense when it is finished. Even the Jigsaw-ripoff of a killer does not have what made Jigsaw so compelling to begin with, which was his perverse sense of justice. He's just a garden-variety sadist at the end of the day.
DYING : Reborn makes the two Saw video games on the 360 look like high art in comparison. It is fun for laughs, and it certainly is worth picking up when it is less than $5 and you want some "so-bad-it's-entertaining" horror for an evening's entertainment. Alcohol consumption while playing might enhance the hilarity.
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