Five Nights at Freddy's 3: Does it Suck?

Five Nights at Freddy's 3 was released on Stream last week. After weeks and weeks from playing the last game, the third installment of the famous Five Nights series is finally here. The Five Nights series has swept the internet by storm for the past year. We've spent countless hours online not only playing the game but watching YouTubers play, and freak out by the jumpscares. Considering on how big Five Nights at Freddy's 1 and 2 were, 3 has huge shoes to fill. Especially considering that there hasn't been that much of a break period between each games, with all three games being released in over a year which is not only crazy, but the series does risk getting old and stale. Has it? Let find out.

Story

Five Nights at Freddy's 3 sets us 30 years in the future since the events of The first game. Freddy Fazbear's pizza restaurant has become an urban legend. So what do you do when you want to make money off of an urban legend other than make two really horrible slasher films about them? You make an attraction based off of an urban legend. That's right Freddy Fazbear's is now an amusement park and you're the star. You play an fake security cop watching over the attraction trying to survive the nights and you'll also be actually working to "keep it authentic" or the people in charge are REALLY cheap... The story is a big shock as some Freddy Theorists had hypothesized that the third installment would had taken place with the original restaurant. If you're new to the games and lore, there was an original Freddy Fazbears that was bought and the restaurant became a franchise a la Chuck E. Cheese. There were four restaurants in the series total. The original one, and unknown one that was referenced, the one from Five Nights at Freddy's 2, and the one from the original game. It is interesting that instead of doing the obvious, the creator, Scott Cawthon, decide to give us all a twist and go in this direction.

Gameplay
The gameplay of Five Nights at Freddy's 3 has been revamped a bit. You are up against one animatronic, Springtrap. You have a new maintenance panel. It mostly works like the ones from the previous games. You don't have battery life like the other games so you have to reboot everything to make sure things are working for you. You still deal with the same camera functions to monitor everything in the building. They do go out so they need to be rebooted so you can know where everything is. The ventilation mechanic is to help calm things down as when it is down, you zone in and out and this gives Springtrap a better opportunity to reach you and he moves more frequently. You have audio devices in order to distract Springtrap as it works like the door switch and the Freddy mask from the previous games, being the only thing to protect you from getting killed.  The other animatronics from the previous games appear as hallucinations that try to hinder you. They mostly appear when you look at the cameras. They can't kill you, but Springtrap can. Minigames between nights are back. They are just as fun as the ones from the previous game. The minigames are important in order to get the different endings in the game. The maintenance panel mechanic was confusing at first. Some game mechanics didn't work. The ventilation mechanic didn't make sense gameplay-wise and storywise. It has no purpose other than to freak you out even more, which the hallucination animatronics kinda already serve that purpose.

Visuals
Visuals look sleeker than the previous games. Instead of everything just looking like images getting closer and closer, they have more movement. There are some scenes that when Springtrap is near your office, he slinks towards across the office window to the doorway. The jumpscares are more fluid. Cawthon did a good job with the visuals.

Final Verdict
So, does it suck? Yes. It is obvious that Cawthon had a lot to live up to with the hype and success with the other games. Sadly he didn't do it. The first game was good and simple. The second one with all the changes to the gameplay was amazing as it took everything with the first one and went big. The third one fell flat as he seemed to lose the focus of what made the series great in order to focus on story and trying to make things more twisted and scary, which he didn't do as well. I love the idea of the phantom animatronics, but they get boring and less scary in a short amount of time. Springtrap loses his scare appeal as well. Again, I understand that Cawthon tried to piggyback off of the fasicnation of the series' lore, but when you try to do that instead of focusing on how to improve the gameplay, the game gets less fun to play. Hopefully this will be the series' swan song. Five Night's at Freddy's 3 gets a 2 out of 5. 

Five Nights at Freddy's 3: Are We Over Spending The Night with Freddy?

     Creators of the Popular Five Nights at Freddy's franchise has recently uploaded an image on the Scott Cawthon's website, scottgames.com teasing that a new game is in the works. A Five Nights at Freddy's 3 being worked on so quickly after we just gotten a Five Nights at Freddy's 2 a few months ago in November doesn't seem so far fetched as we've gotten the sequel a mere months after the original game came out.
     Five Nights at Freddy's is a point and click survival horror game in which you play a security guard at a restaurant that has to monitor the place. You work each night from 12am to 6am (nine minutes in real time) trying to avoid Freddy and his animatronic friends from killing you, thinking you're an endoskeleton like them that needs a new suit. In the first game you had cameras in different rooms to monitor the animatronics whereabouts and a door operated by a limited battery supply. In the sequel, you have no door but instead a mask to fool some of the robots, not all of them, cameras, a wind-up box to keep a marionette form getting you, and a flashlight to ward off Freddy and his friends. The first and second Freddy games were a run away hit with a ton of people playing them due to word of mouth, and a ton of Let's Plays on YouTube. Of course with a hit franchise it is best to milk it for all its worth by making as many sequels as possible, but should Cawthon and Scottgames make another sequel. Have we already gotten over the scariest game of 2014?
     A new Freddy's game might seem cool and all, but there are some signs that people might be over the series. First and foremost, there's oversaturation. There is a such thing as being exposed too much to something. It hasn't been longer than a year and we have two FNAF games and a third one coming along. There isn't enough time to process the first two games, leaving people to get sick and over the next installment and series altogether. I understand Cawthon wanting to strike while the iron is hot, but at this point it's becoming overkill.
     Adding to the oversaturation of the franchise, there's also the fact its appeal by having these games turned out the way they are. FNAF is a survival horror game. By having these games continuing to be pushed out like they are, its cheapening the whole horror aspect of the games. It's making them less scary. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 had this problem. They completely reworked the game mechanics that gave the sequel a fresh spin on the original and it was amazing, but the fear factor, the reason why the series became so popular and the reason for its infamy, greatly dwindled as the jump scares got more and more boring as you continued to play unlike the original.
     Again, it is cool that we are getting another sequel and it will be nice to see what will be new to the series. By the look of the picture and possibly as theorized according to a video from The Game Theorist, FNAT 3 might be going back to to the first restaurant and might have a more gritter version of Freddy and his friends. This might what the series needs to end for its swan song. Or it might end up being a final nail in the coffin.

What do you think? Do we need another Five Nights at Freddy's game or do you think the series has jumped the shark?