Don't Even Think (PS4) Review

Don't Even Think was a PS4 exclusive Battle Royale game, which for the longest time was only playable in North-America. It released in July 2019 on US-Servers and entered Europe in April 2020. Only one month later the developers announced the cancellation of the game and the servers shut down on the 25th August worldwide (The developers officially blamed the Corona-outbreak for the cancellation, but I believe it is more likely that they have looted the playerbase enough and any further improvement of the game/ creation of new content was in their eyes not profitable anymore).

The standout feature of Don't Even Think is its inclusion of Werewolves into a Battle Royale game. 33 Humans in 11 Squads combat each other and 3 Werewolf players in every match. The survivors start on board of a plane into the match and have to loot weapons, armour and healing items on the ground (as in nearly every BR game). The weapon selection in DET is actually very limited. There are only four base types of weapons: Shotguns, AR-Rifles, Sniper-Rifles and a Hybrid of AR and Sniper (You could call it a Semi automatic Sniper). Players can equip two weapons simultaneously with the exception of silver bullet pistols and grenades. Like in most other BR-games the weapons have different colours indicating their effectiveness ranging from grey, over blue, green and purple till gold. Shotguns can be useful in close combat, while ARs feel underpowered in this game. The reason is the clunky gameplay, which makes it much harder to hit enemies, than it should be. Even without the lags it is difficult to hit shots in close combat. Long range weapons are therefore more effective, since they are less dependent on smooth gameplay. The sniper is strong against minimal moving targets, but useless against high mobility players or werewolves that don't run straight (Reloading is really slow for every weapon in this game, but it is worse for the sniper, because it has to reload after every bullet). The Hybrid sniper was therefore my go to weapon, since it had a higher rate of fire and still did enough damage (I usually carried the Shotgun as my secondary weapon). Shotgun and AR allowed switching between First and Third Person aim while zooming in, the two sniper weapons on the other hand were always zooming in First person.

Players could also use their fists in melee combat. Fists were actually pretty weak, but sadly in close range combat sometimes still more effective than other weapons due to the clunky and imprecise gunplay. (I know literally no other shooter, where combat can get this weird). The pistols with silver bullets are very rare (You can most of the time only find them in supply drops) and only good against werewolves, but very effective at that. Normal weapons do minimal damage to werewolves (unless you got gold weapons, which are way better than all other rarities), but 2-3 shots with silver bullets will completely kill a werewolf. Even though a lot of players complained about Werewolves  being too OP, I actually believe they found a good balance here. Against survivors with average gear the Werewolves have a strong advantage, as it should be, but against a high gear squad a single werewolf got a disadvantage. Against such squads of survivors with the best weapons, the werewolves would have to work together. In early game obviously survivors will not have these weapons and therefore have to either run or hide from werewolves (if they can), but it still seems balanced enough for me. Survivors shouldn't be able to overcome the Werewolves in the first minute. Of course this also means luck can play a bigger role in early game than in other BR-games and it also demonstrates that Don't Even Think is a new kind of BR game, that is closer to a mix of an asymmetric BR and Survival game.

Healing items work like in every other game (There are Adrenalin syringes, med packs, apples and meat). The two last aspects worth mentioning about the survivors are Looting and Freezing. Looting in this game is pretty tedious. There are suitcases randomly dropped around the whole map and dead players also leave them behind. In order to access them players have to stand exactly on top of them and select the weapons they want to exchange or the items they want to collect. The two bad aspects about this are, that you can not move a single centimeter or you can no longer access anything and that there is no inventory in which you could compare your loot. You therefore always have to stand still in a very small distance for an eternity and have to guess which weapons you already have equipped or the looting process will get even longer. Looting is overcomplicated and annoying, even when you get used to the process.

The map continuously gets smaller (like in most other BR-games...) and once you are out of the zone, you will lose points of your body warmth indicator. If the body warmth gets to zero, you will start to lose actual health. Adrenalin syringes can temporarily increase body warmth, but only fireplaces will permanently restore body warmth. The system reminded me a bit of Darwin Project and it certainly works well enough in both games.

Werewolves play a lot differently than Survivors. They first start the matches in their human form. They now have to collect blood from either premade corpses or killed survivors. Werewolf players can in their human form only use axes as weapons. These axes however are actually pretty good (do much more damage than fists), so that Werewolf players still have an advantage over individual survivors. A full squad of survivors with decent gear however can easily kill the Werewolf players before he has the chance to transform. 2 warm (killed survivors) or 5 colder corpses will be enough to start the disgusting transforming process, which is going to take around 15-20 seconds. After that werewolves have reached their final form and they can now start to hunt humans. From the get go werewolves can use their standard claw attacks, sprint and dodge. Unless survivors have a strong armour, the claw attacks will rip them apart pretty easily. Till the werewolf runs out of stamina he can even mash these attacks. The sprint is also pretty useful since Werewolves are a lot faster than survivors and it will be near impossible for them to outrun a werewolf. They just have to hope that he loses them during the chase or gets distracted by other players (The dodge ability was in my opinion not all that useful). Werewolves have an armour, that automatically regenerates after time and they can replenish their life bar by consuming corpses.

The Werewolves also have 4 special abilities, that they unlock through the consumption of corpses (warm corpses fill the ability bars up faster). The first ability is speed run, which allows the werewolf to continuously sprint for 30 seconds and his speed is even faster than that of a regular sprint. This ability is great to either hunt down survivors or to quickly escape from danger. The second ability is howl, which makes the werewolf howl very loudly towards his teammates. The other werewolves receive the location information of the howling werewolf, but survivors can also hear the howl in a relatively big proximity. The third ability is scent, which allows the werewolf to sniff after survivors. The location of all players that are within a few hundred meters will be revealed (The scan goes even through buildings, environments and so on). The fourth ability is a powerful jump attack. I personally found the scent and superspeed ability the most useful and often used them in combination to hunt all players down. The jump attack is also helpful, if you battle multiple enemies at once.

The Werecat class works mostly the same as the Werewolves (Super speed and scent work very similarly for Werecats). Instead of a howl, the Werecat has a stealth ability, which makes her invisible for 20 seconds. The first attack during stealth mode will also do extra damage. Instead of the jump attack, Werecats can use an auto-aim ability, that lasts for 10 seconds and makes them target the nearest survivor. The Werecat class was a nice addition to the Werewolves, but it shouldn't have been locked behind a paywall (More to that later on).

The map I have been playing on, was the Season 2 map Blood Paw Valley. It seems to be bigger than the first map and at least has got more POIs. The terrain seems to be a bit more diverse, even though I would criticize the environment for being too barren in between some of the places. There is once again a crashed plane site in the middle of the map, where Werewolves for example can find a lot of corpses and there usually are also a lot of survivors here. Sawmill village lies in the south of Blood Paw Valley and a larger fishing village is located in the east. In the northwest of there are an abandoned train station and a large mining pit. In the northeast is the biggest village of the map (Talast Town) with a solar energy facility aside it and in the southwest is a big sacrifice altar complex built on top of a mountain, which is probably the POI that gave Blood Paw Valley its name. The POIs are divided by impassable mountains and some rivers and seas. Despite criticizing the barren parts of Blood Paw Valley, the map is probably one of the stronger aspects of DET. I liked the variety of places and enjoyed landing at different places. Altar, the mine and the place would probably my favourite locations. Only downside were the buildings and huts, that all looked way too similar.

One of the biggest problems of Don't Even Think are its disastrous technical problems. During every match there are constant inaccaptable lags, which should simply never appear on a fully released Playstation game (One might rightfully argue, that this kind of lag would even be inaccaptable in an Alpha). These lags already start at the plane flying over the map in the beginning of the match and they negatively influence every gunfight, since they are so random and heavy. There are of course also moments of a few minutes without any lag, but that should be the norm and not the exception. The game also seems to be randomly crashing, which at least was far more occasional than the Lags. Nonetheless, these crashes happen far more than in most other games. It was actually really sad to see this horrible technical status of the game right till the very end. The game had released more than a year prior and practically no improvements have been achieved whatsoever in regards to the technical problems.

The gameplay in general unfortunately is also pretty clunky. Both the guns of the survivors and the claw attacks of the werewolves lack the precision, which is normally existent in these kinds of games. Shooting within a 10 meter range could turn into a real struggle and often people swinging their fists had more control than somebody shooting a gun, which shouldn't be the case (Longer distance gunfights were thankfully a bit less clunky). The werewolf attacks also often hit the air instead of the enemies. It didn't turn into a big disadvantage however since the werewolves were so strong and fast anyways.

Another aspect, that didn't work so great was the Ping-system. Outside of the Voice chat there is no real way to communicate with the other teammembers. There are no voice commands and location pings can only be performed on the map. They however seemed to not be removable, which is why I didn't really use them unless it was necessary. Queuing up with friends for example was also feature, that the developers only implemented after the start of Season 2 in 2020. The whole communication system was definitely a bit lacking (To be fair Pinging has only been becoming more mainstream since the rise of Apex Legends and many games still don't have it, but you can certainly feel the difference in communication).  

The visuals of the game are also not particularly impressive (which is putting it mildly). The whole presentation is very basic and there are certainly a lot of PS3 game, which don't have to be afraid to being compared to DET. Nonetheless, I at least appreciate that this is a low budget BR game, that didn't went for a cartoonish visual style. I would rate the visuals nonetheless as a bit disappointing. Soundeffects and music are okay, but also nothing really worth talking about. Footsteps of other survivors are at least clearly audible.

Don't Even Think had two Battle Pass Seasons during its lifetime. I played the game during the Season 2, where it not only changed a bit of the gameplay, but was also being played on a different map than before (I described the Season 2 Map in a previous paragraph). The old map was a lot more homogeneous. It was based in a large forest, which environmentally looked pretty cool and consistent. The POIs on the other hand left something to be desired. There was a crashed plane in the middle of the map as well, but otherwise there were only 4 different helipad landing places, two graveyards called 'Piles of Bodies' and some isolated huts fragmented around the forest. I preferred the tight forest of Season 1 as the background environment, but liked all the different POIs of the Season 2 map more.

The gameplay was also a bit different during Season 1. Instead of the regular shrinking BR zone cycle of S02, there were no real zones on the map. Players had the goal to find data chronicles hidden around the map. If they managed to find 3 data chronicles in the right order, they could fire a flare gun to call in a rescue helicopter. The survivors had to evacuate via the helicopters. Just killing all other players and werewolves wouldn't have been enough to win (which they changed in S02. Helicopters were called in automatically in the last zone and players could also win by eliminating all other players and werewolves). Werewolves also didn't transform after eating corpses, but instead they mutated after nightfall arrived. Night time also gave all survivors the coldness effect regardless of their position on the map. Therefore survivors in the late game had to manage their body warmth status a lot more than in Season 2. Generally the gameplay was probably a lot more unique during S01 and I would have liked to play that version as well.

Season 1 and 2 also brought Battle Passes. The S01 version had 60 and the S02 version had 100 Tiers. It can generally be said, that the S01 BP had more moderate skins and the S02 Pass more fancy and colourful skins. There were also noticeably less free rewards in the Season 1 version. In S02 most skins had extra versions, that could be unlocked by completing separate skin challenges. What I found really weird is, that the Season 2 Battle Pass also had multiple Werecat skins, even though you still needed to buy an extra Werecat Pack for 25 Euro/Dollars in order to have access to them. The Battle Pass could be leveled by either completing weekly challenges (which reset every 4 weeks) or daily challenges, which were also very basic and could mostly be completed by simply playing the game. Overall these Battle Passes were alright, but also nothing to memorable.

The ingame shop of DET allowed players to either buy individual cosmetics via D-Points, which were available for money, or to buy random lootboxes with the regular currency, which players received by either just playing the game or performing daily quests. The regular lootboxes contained mostly trash items and there was a high chance of getting duplicated items. There were also higher value lootboxes, which had to be bought with D-Points. Duplicated items could at least be exchanged into L-Points, which could also be used to get some specific higher value items from the shop. The fourth currency were DET-coins which were given to players, who queued as survivors. Users queuing to play as werewolves had to pay with DET-coins in order to balance the matchmaking.

I primarily played the game after the shutdown announcement and got benefited by L-Points and D-Points being given away for free by the developers. Nonetheless, I have to constitute, that this itemshop system was pretty bad. Most things were hidden behind a paywall, which in terms of cosmetics might at least be somewhat understandable, but hiding items behind lootboxes, giving the best items ridiculously low odds of being chosen and giving away duplicated items frequently was just a disaster. Another bad decision was hiding the Werecat class behind a paywall as well. A new class should in my opinion have either been free or at least grindable with ingame currency. The werecat pack from the shop didn't only unlock the Werewolf alternative, but also allowed survivors to get an unfair advantage through flying drones. These flying drones could be ordered to attack enemy players and support their owners in battle. The drones might have not been doing as much damage as regular weapons, but it was still an unfair advantage against players without drones. You could therefore also put on record, that DET implemented some P2W elements with Season 2. At least these got removed in the last months before the shutdown, when they gave away the Werecat Pack, D-Points and so on for free.  

 

Pro:

- Unique asymmetric PVP-System between Survivors and Werewolves

- Survivors vs Werewolves relatively good balanced

- Werewolf gameplay is great fun

- Map is decent

 

Contra:

- Horrible Lags and generally bad technical status

- Clunky Gameplay (Gunplay + Tedious Looting process)

- Disappointing visuals

- Werecat/drones hidden behind paywall (P2W elements)

- Bad itemshop system/ Expensive Lootboxes with duplicate items

(-Gameplay was more unique during Season 1)

 

Result:

The concept of Don't Even Think, as a truly asymmetric Battle Royale game between survivors and werewolves, is great. Keeping the balance between these uneven factions is difficult, but in my opinion, the devs actually succeeded at that. The problems are just most of the other aspects. I can easily overlook the mediocre visuals, but the clunky gameplay and the simply inaccaptable lags hold this game back so much. I would really like to give this game at least a score of 6/10, but the fact, that they also implemented clear P2W elements into the game is just too much. Yes, this paywall got removed after the cancellation of the game was announced, but that is too late and I have to find a balance of subjective and objective judgement. Despite its flaws DET and the werewolf gameplay especially were fun. If they executed the concept better and fixed the massive issues I criticized, this could have easily been a 8/10. Sadly that wasn't the case, but I am still happy I gave this game a try.

5.5/10