A solid game that stays close to the movie franchise.
Rather than making a standard platformer with Jason as the final boss, the fine folks at Galoob/LJN opted to make a more true to movie experience with this game. The game takes place at camp Crystal Lake (the traditional backdrop of the movies before Jason supposedly took Manhattan) where you can control six camp counselors, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, as they try to survive three nights of pure, unadulterated HORROR! The counselors aren’t the only ones at risk because there are cabins full of kids that need to be rescued from Jason’s bloody mitts as well.
You’ll start the game by picking one counselor, any counselor and fighting through endless waves of zombies that climb out of the ground. While your counselor is only armed with rocks at first, you can find weapons such as knives and machetes with a little bit of searching. Each counselor has different strengths and weaknesses for instance; Crissy is faster and can jump higher than Mark while Rob, who doesn’t believe that a man can’t wear too much pink, is well rounded in terms of speed and jumping. You can change counselors on the fly by walking into a cabin where you can change between counselors on the cabin submenu. If you’re feeling saucy, you can even strategically place your counselors around the camp in case one of the slow characters won’t be able to make it to an area in time.
While you’re venturing through the camp or the woods and caves around it, you’ll periodically hear an alarm go off meaning that someone is in trouble be it another counselor or one of the fifteen kids that you have to protect. You’ll know where trouble is brewing thanks to a map you can view on the pause screen. A flashing icon will let you know where Jason is frolicking and you’ll have one minute to reach them for the rescue and a confrontation with the man himself.
Battles with Jason aren’t particularly difficult on the first day since he’s slow and pretty rusty. Your best strategy is to memorize his patterns and dodge his attacks by pressing down on the d-pad and hitting left or right. Sometimes he’ll try to pull a fast one on you by attacking twice in a row, but it can be easily avoided. On day two and three Jason gets significantly faster and will test your reflexes. You’ll engage in a series of small battles with him where you take a certain amount of his life and he’ll run away. If you choose to pursue, you’ll occasionally get the chance to fight him outside where you’ll have to dodge the axes he throws at you while you attempt to unload on him. After every altercation with Jason, you’ll get closer to night time where the ante is upped in terms of difficulty. Zombies will spawn faster and helpful items such as health jars which replenish your health bar when it runs out are less frequent. You’ll also encounter some of the more difficult baddies like wolves and ravens. Just before dawn you’ll have your final fight with Jason where you’ll have to deplete the rest of his energy and put him away for good - so to speak since we all know Jason never really dies.
The visuals of Friday the 13th are a tad mixed. On one hand, you have dynamically changing backgrounds that change depending on where you are in the camp and a pseudo 3D view when you’re in the cabins scattered all around. On the other there are only a handful of enemies and only a couple of bosses, one of which is a hidden surprise that I won’t spoil here. The limited amount of enemies can be considered a good thing since the movies only featured one antagonist, that being Jason himself. Your characters are all palette-swapped which results is most of the guys looking like the girls. Still, you can’t be too critical of a NES game that lets you play as six different characters. The day to night transitions, while not seamless, are a nice added bonus and can even get pretty creepy at times, namely getting lost in the woods after dark.
The sound doesn’t impress much. The game’s soundtrack consists of sixteen repeating notes that loop over and over making the music become annoying pretty quick. Aside from the annoying soundtrack, the general game sounds aren’t too impressive and really don’t help to link the game up with the movies. The most obvious omission is the addition of the traditional “ch-ch-ch” Jason sound effect.
Friday the 13th is a game that is sure to go above the expectations that anyone might have for a game based off of a series of slasher movies. While the game doesn’t feature gameplay that was traditional for the platform, it didn’t cut corners with bringing the movie experience home or what players all clamored to do for years: kill Jason. On that front, it definitely delivers.