More than 500,000 players logged into Halloween: The Game within hours of its release, and the numbers on Steam reportedly made it the biggest debut yet for an asymmetrical horror title. That's the kind of opening weekend most studios dream about. But the game's first reviews weren't exactly glowing.

According to JoBlo's follow-up review, a day-one patch addressed a long list of problems players had flagged before launch, including matchmaking delays, NPC pathfinding, crashes, achievement tracking, scoring and stamina balancing. The outlet's earlier writeup had been mixed. The second one isn't.

Built by IllFonic and Gun Interactive around John Carpenter's 1978 original, the game drops players into Haddonfield either as Michael Myers or as one of the civilians trying to survive the night. JoBlo's reviewer, who says they came to the franchise through Halloween 4 and admits a soft spot for asymmetrical multiplayer games in general, found matchmaking practically instant post-patch, which for a genre built on quick, chaotic rounds matters more than almost anything else.

The atmosphere gets singled out as the game's real strength. Streets, houses, lighting and sound design apparently do the heavy lifting in making Haddonfield feel lived-in, and Story Mode, a roughly two-hour extended tutorial with a deliberately grainy visual texture, is described as short by design rather than short on effort.

Playing as Michael is where the review gets most enthusiastic. His ability to vanish and reappear around the map, paired with heavy breathing and score work lifted straight from Carpenter's film grammar, is what apparently sells the fantasy of being The Shape rather than just a guy who stabs people a lot. Environmental kills add variety on that side. On the civilian side, players search houses for supplies, contact police and try to coordinate escapes while Michael lurks somewhere nearby, though the review admits the game explains this half far less clearly than it explains Michael's.

Not everything lands. Character likenesses take a hit, with Laurie Strode singled out as looking closer to Vera Farmiga than Jamie Lee Curtis, an odd miss given how much care apparently went into recreating the film's look elsewhere. Voice acting is said to cover for it well enough.

The bigger story here is the gap between launch-week Early Access chatter and what the game looks like once developers actually patch it. Whether that goodwill holds through the next content drop, and whether IllFonic keeps the servers stable as the player base settles in past its opening weekend, is the thing to watch next.