If you have been on social media recently, you may have seen viral videos of “Lethal Company” players screaming while being chased by monsters in an abandoned building. That game, developed by Zeekerss, was released in October last year. “Lethal Company” has been blowing up on the internet as many famous YouTubers are making content with the game. These videos have resulted in many entertaining clips all over social media. After the release, “Lethal Company” was selling better than “Modern Warfare 3” on Steam. This is surprising because it has a single developer while MW3 has a big team and company behind it.
“Lethal Company’s” gameplay is simple. The premise is that you and up to 3 other crewmates work for The Company, who require a certain quota of value scrap that increases every 3 days. To obtain the scrap, you go to abandoned moons to enter a building that is full of scrap and animals. You can purchase tools to assist in surviving and make the gameplay easier. The part of the game that hooks people in is the scariness, randomness, and funniness. When on the moon, you are never truly safe from death as there are plenty of creatures inside and outside the building who utilize certain traits.
There are baboon hawks, earth leviathans, eyeless dogs, and tree giants outside the building. The baboon hawks are small creatures that could jump you and steal your scrap but can retreat if you yell at it through your microphone. The eyeless dogs are huge dogs that can hear your microphone and in-game items but are easily avoided by being silent. Tree giants can only see you so you have to maneuver around the moon to avoid being chased carefully. Earth Leviathans create dust around the player while swiftly jumping up and eating you. Inside the building, there are many creatures, some safe and some dangerous.
The most popular one is the Bracken, a large mysterious animal that sneaks around you until you are not looking or looks too long to attack you and snap your neck. Sometimes you can just stumble near where a hiding one is and instantly be killed and dragged away from your team. The Coil-Head is a humanoid with a coiled neck that only attacks you when you are not looking at it. The Thumper crawls around without legs and speeds at you whenever it sees you. There are smaller less dangerous creatures than those including the bunker spider, snare flea, and hydrodere.
There are also passive creatures that only attack if you bother them like the hoarding bug and spore lizards. On more dangerous moons, there are Jesters, Masked, and Nutcrackers. The jester winds up before chasing you at high speeds, Masked pose as teammates but attack you, and Nutcrackers walk around with shotguns. If you are too paranoid and look behind you a lot in the game, the ghost girl could spawn only for the haunted teammate and mess with you until it decides to kill you.
With all those monsters, it makes the game very random as everything could be fine in one moment and the next, there is a chain reaction of mishaps caused by the creatures and dangers of the building. In most horror games, playing multiplayer destroys the scary aspect but that is not the case for
“Lethal Company”. When getting chased, usually get scared and run as far as you can wherever you can, causing you to get separated from the group and hear your crewmates screaming in the distance. Being alone in “Lethal Company” kills your hope and causes most players to panic and yell to see if your friends respond. “Lethal Company” uses proximity voice chat. This causes you to hear your team more realistically. When far away from your teammates, you cannot hear them, and as they approach their voice gets louder. Much can happen in any scenario that makes the game so entertaining.
All of the moons are always different in terms of the rooms in the building, where the scrap is, and where things spawn. Every time you land the ship, things are different that heavily influence how smooth the game will be. There are different weather options a moon could have such as a flood that restricts where you could walk, a storm that causes lighting to strike metal scrap, and an eclipse that increases enemy spawn rate. With such variation, it is hard to get bored of the game.
Playing with friends is a fun experience. If you are with a group of friends, and see one of them fall, get snatched, or a snare flea hop on them and hear them scream, it is very entertaining to see. If you get bored of the game or want to spice it up, you can install mods to add new features made by other people. You can get mods to get more people to fit in a lobby. “Lethal Company” player Lucas Johnson, a student at Liberty High School, has played 34 hours of the game and says: “I have a lot of fun because of how it’s scary and I can play with friends.”
All of those features caused “Lethal Company” to dominate “Modern Warfare 3”. “Modern Warfare 3” was not responded to well by fans because it is seen as a clone of the past games. The content that can be made from “Lethal Company” is better than “Modern Warfare 3” because it is more or less the same as other “Call of Duty” games. The price factor also plays a major part as “Lethal Company” is only $10 for all that content while it is $70 for just another lackluster “Call of Duty” Game. If you look at the reviews, Many fans of “Call of Duty” were disappointed and called it “rushed”. Ryan Nord takes “Lethal Company’s” side with: “I think it’s right “Lethal Company” won because “Modern Warfare 3” is just the same thing as the others.”
“Modern Warfare 3” only has so much content to offer as the campaign, can be completed in around 5 hours. Many articles considered it “disappointing” or “comically bad.” The zombie game mode has more varied opinions, with some saying it is awful, while others say they love it. The Player versus Player mode also has been controversial as there are many good and bad reviews. “Lethal Company” took the lead in sales and how good the game is for its uniqueness and how it can seldom get boring. It shows that consumers in the video game industry are looking for unique and refreshing games instead of overused and milked games.
Corrin S • Feb 13, 2024 at 2:01 pm
Recent yearly-release games like CoD are getting so underwhelming :/ It’s great to see that people are acknowledging indie shooters too