Slender: The Arrival Reviews
All in all, I had a decent time with Slender: The Arrival. It won't go down as one of my favorite horror games, but the experience was a fun one while it lasted. It's a bit short and there's not a ton of replay value, but Slender: The Arrival offers enough scares and at a budget price, is a no brainer for horror fans.
Had more emphasis gone into the game's design (and, more importantly, length), Slender: The Arrival could've been one of the better horror experiences on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Instead, it's just a forgettable retread of a better PC game – and one you can easily pass over for a bigger, better game.
When you're not getting annoyed at being unable to find the final item in a given area, Slender: The Arrival is an excellent horror game that will leave your pulse racing. It's terrifying to be chased by these relentless enemies - frightening to see them no matter where you turn as you lose yourself deeper and deeper in the game's maze-like environments. It's just a shame that it can get so unbearably annoying to have to find a single scrap of paper hidden in a forest while enemies seem to guard its location over aggressively. If you can tolerate these moments, however, you'll experience a truly frightening game that will leave your guts in knots as you try, and fail (and fail, and fail), to stay alive.
Short of the performance and presentation improvements, this is the same survival horror game that you've probably already played. It functions fine now, and is perfectly adequate if you're in the market for a cheap and cheerful blast of terror – but don't expect much more. Small in both scope and budget, Slender: The Arrival is little more than a rest stop on the way to something bigger and better.
Slender: The Arrival is more frustrating than scary. The atmospheric locations are wasted in this boring survival-horror game where players do little more than search around for numbered items. The game goes a long way to flesh out the story and mythology, but it never makes a convincing argument for why Slender deserves to be a franchise.
Slender: The Arrival is neither a bad or exceedingly good title. If you've played the last-gen version, you'll be getting the same thing here. If you're a newcomer, you'll be getting a fun but quick-to-finish game. The graphics haven't improved all that much and even the same glitch remains, but nonetheless it is still a title that provides entertainment. The soundtrack can be top-notch in places and the run of adrenaline can spur you on to keep playing when you see Slender Man for the first time. At its reasonably cheap price of £7.99/$9.99, the game isn't on the highly recommended list. Slender may be starting to lose his frightening charm, but he still manages to keep us on our toes, even if it is just for a short while.
Slender delivers plenty of solid jump-scares spread across the story mode, but there's far too much repetitive gameplay in between the actual action to make it worth the experience.
Slender: The Arrival has solid qualities, as well as some hit or miss tendencies, leaning towards the miss side.
With the move to current-gen consoles and a few new levels, horror hit Slender continues to offer up scares, but at the cost of its own mystique.