Horror movie fans are well-aware of the Terrifier franchise, a series of low-budget slasher movies that pushed gore and violence to extreme levels, becoming massively profitable cult hits known as “those movies with the mute clown that make people vomit and faint”. Unlike most slasher franchises, Terrifier is also well-liked by critics, making it stand out from the myriad of shoestring-budgeted horror flicks meant solely to capitalize on their small production costs. One thing I wasn’t expecting from the franchise was for a game to be made out of it, but most importantly, for it to be a retro-styled beat ’em up. Oh, and for it to be absolutely dreadful.

There’s a difference between looking low-budgeted but with an effort put into it, and just looking plain cheap. Terrifier is the latter.

Terrifier: The ARTcade Game is a game obviously inspired by another licensed beat ’em up released years ago: the Scott Pilgrim game. It is an obvious dead ringer for it, featuring a nearly-identical art style, co-op support for up to four players, and a somewhat goofy sense of humor, which stands out like an absolute sore thumb in the case of the horror-tinged carbon copy. Whilst Scott Pilgrim vs. The World feels fluid, polished, combo-focused and fun, Terrifier feels like the absolute opposite in every single regard: it’s clunky, ugly to look at, buggy, unfunny, and just boring to withstand for more than ten minutes at a time.

You can choose between Art the Clown, Victoria (the disfigured woman from the first movie), the little ghost girl that revived Art in the second movie, and Chris Jericho. Sure, he has a character in both Terrifier sequels, but he’s very minute in them, and let’s face it, the appeal is the fact that you can play as Chris Jericho. Stats-wise, there’s not a lot that differs one from the other. All four characters are slow, clunky, with a monstrously limited movepool, and they all suffer from the same gameplay issues: bad button responsiveness, clunky collision detection, the lack of a move cancellation (once you click a button, you’re committed to that action), and the fact you gotta perform a small QTE ever single damn time you are attacked and fall to the floor.

If you’ve ever wanted to play as Chris Jericho in a bad beat ’em up, have I got a game for you…

It’s a buggy mess which crashes on occasion. It also features one of the worst collections of voice acting I’ve seen in a video game. Even if the music itself isn’t that bad (it’s just very repetitive), all instances of voice acting are comprised of truly atrocious clips I really can’t tell if they’re AI generated, or if the developers decided to hire someone to do the single worst Duke Nukem impression in history. Regardless of the intention, it’s not funny, it’s not amusing, it plain sucks. The fact that a game based on Terrifier tries so hard to go for a humorous tone baffles me. Just because the franchise’s main villain is a clown, doesn’t mean we were looking for comedy in the first place.

Blood and guts can splatter the screen at times, only to make the game more annoying to deal with.

My main question here is, who is Terrifier: The ARTcade Game for? Beat ’em up fans won’t find any redeeming qualities in one of the genre’s clunkiest outings in years. Fans of the horror franchise will struggle a lot to find any semblance of enjoyment from this edgelordish and overpriced mess that features cheap visuals, poor controls and little to no replay value, as well as a tone that just doesn’t blend in at all with the movies. It’s just a Scott Pilgrim vs. The World knockoff that just frustrated me pretty quickly; all it really made me want to do at the end of the day was delete it immediately from my hard drive and actually replay Scott Pilgrim instead.

Terrifier: The ARTcade Game is available now on PS5, Xbox Series S/X, PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.