1987 Freddy Fazbear's Pizza

Title: 1987 Freddy Fazbear's Pizza
Link: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=545427336
Author: Deep Thunder
Survivors: L4D2
Notes: Essentially a survival map played through five times, scripting didn't work as intended.

1987 Fazbear's Pizza is the second in the Five Nights at Freddy's series of campaigns by Deep Thunder. This is the sequel to Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria and it contains some notable differences from it. There are extended areas, more resources in side passages, more useful vents, more polished camerawork, a running Spirited Away theme, and a more streamlined series of events that doesn't culminate in a holdout after the five nights have been survived. The difficulty was also much more tame than the original campaign, what worked for me anyway.

As with the original Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, there is a huge attention detail paid here. There are many secrets, including finding teddy bears and feeding some of the FNAF characters. There's a shooting range minigame from Dark Carnival that replaces the models with those from FNAF and a lot more secrets than those that even I found.

This is an odd campaign for me to review, mostly because with both times I played it, the scripting didn't work as intended. On the third night, infected failed to spawn and it just became a matter of standing still and doing nothing. Apparently I'm not the only one for whom this has happened (the author mentioned it and another player has confirmed it happening to him). I wish I could have played it without this crippling bug because otherwise it would've been pretty fun.

There are two major deviations from the original Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. The first is that the main holdout area is a lot bigger and doesn't have two doors on either side. There's a large console screen on the central table that features about a dozen various camera views, but unfortunately they don't contribute much to the gameplay. There are a couple of vents on either side that link up to some rooms with supplies, which makes it more open than the first map. The second deviation is that now there is a wind-up music box that needs to be wound up every thirty seconds or so, otherwise tanks will begin to spawn. A convenient indicator tells you when you need to wind it up. You can avoid tanks entirely by constantly winding it up, which is good in theory, but there are a couple problems with this.

First of all, this is terrible when you're being attacked constantly, since it takes a whole player out of commission for about fifteen seconds at a time. Secondly, it's detrimental to the gameplay. It's just not fun to simply hold E on something for fifteen seconds every thirty seconds or so. People play this game to shoot zombies, not wind up music boxes. This wouldn't be that much of an issue if it only needed to be wound up once or twice per night, but this thing needs to be interacted with a lot per night. If you're doing this in single-player or nobody has joined you yet in coop, this means you're relying entirely on the bots to do the fighting for you, and their reaction time and accuracy are, at best, unreliable. With a fully prepared and experienced group, it shouldn't be a problem to cover one teammate, but the game just doesn't work well when bots are in that role.

The various "safe areas" were nice and detailed and there were plenty of supplies. In fact it seems that there might actually be too many supplies and too many extra areas, since there was a ton of extra space that didn't really seem to get used much at all. It was nice to see, but ultimately the gameplay hinges on a simple holdout in one room the entire time. A lot of the space seems wasted, or that it could have been put to better use. I also didn't understand one bit about what I can only guess to be related to No Face from the movie Spirited Away. I don't know FNAF or anime, so I can only guess that this is just a reference by the author added in for fun, but considering how much precedence it takes in the campaign, you'd think there would be some kind of point.

Difficulty: This is difficult for me to judge because the campaign just won't work right for me. Infected don't spawn during night 3 or any night after. From what I did play in night 2, everything seemed pretty doable, but from what I know about the music box and from the scripting I saw in the file, it looks like it would be a nightmare to try to keep the music box wound up during nights 3-5, even on Normal difficulty.

Final Verdict: More easily beatable than the original Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, but with the obvious, huge glaring bug of infected not spawning on night 3 or after, this campaign is really not worth your time unless it gets fixed or unless you're a huge fan of the Five Nights at Freddy's games. I like the look of this map, I really do. It's a good layout with lots of details and secrets, references, a clear goal, sufficient supplies, and a simple holdout premise. Unfortunately, it's very repetitive, the music box winding is too frequent and serves only to make it artificially more difficult, and there's really not much more to it than just shooting down a corridor and pressing E on a button. I really wish I could recommend this more because it's a well-made map but aside from its reference material, it devolves into forgettable, skippable mediocrity. Let's face it, if this weren't based on popular source material, this wouldn't be nearly as popular as it is.

Rating: 3.3/5.
66 ovens spitting out infinite pizzas out of 100.