izigame.me

Oh, Security Breach, where do I begin with you?
For starters, I'm aware that this game was marred with a difficult development process. Ultimately, I believe that Security Breach was a project Steel Wool bit off that was far larger than they could chew. Up until Security Breach's release, Steel Wool had been largely centered around smaller, less ambitious projects. Security Breach was led with little to no project management, so this was a ship that sailed without a captain to guide it, and boy does that show.
For starters, the optimization and sheer size of this game is, frankly, offensive. Approximately 90 GB of data is the price of admission to play this game. Most of that size is what I suspect is content that remained unused, but still in the files, until Ruin, as well as uncompressed audio files, of which there is an unholy amount. When you actually get to booting up Security Breach, you will be lucky if the game doesn't shit itself and crash because it's loading so much crap all at once. Steel Wool attempted to break up the map into different loading zones behind closed doors that load a new zone when they open, but that really doesn't make much of a difference when every corner of the atrium, which is a massive area, is constantly loaded at all times until you completely leave the area. This optimization philosophy rings true for the entire game, so when entering a graphically intensive zone, expect your setup to CHUG. Even with the latest specs, your PC will beg for its life as the game makes it load Monty's Gator Golf.
I 100%-ed this game on my XBox and am in the process of doing the same on my Steam profile (mostly because I'm just a big achievement guy. I like achievements). This means that I have done the Hide and Seek Master achievement twice and gotten to experience the pure, unadulterated glory of the enemy AI with no safety net, and I can confidently say that the AI is cheating. The AI for enemies like Chica is pretty terrible. You can easily shake them off your tail, especially so in large areas or in the late game when there are more upgrades in your inventory. Steel Wool seems to have somewhat acknowledged this and compensated by giving the enemies the ability to cheat to get ahead of you. Every single room is infested with staff bots that circle the only path you can take, not because you are expected to play stealthily, but because the actual threats will not catch you otherwise if there aren't 50 staff bots ready to snatch you up like the boogeyman. The enemy AI has what I assume to be infinite vision range, so they can spot you from halfway across the map when they realistically shouldn't. The staff bots also have this really annoying quirk of being able to teleport an animatronic either directly behind you or in such close proximity of you that you can't reasonably be expected to be able to get away. It would have been far better if they had improved the pathfinding of the animatronics, so instead of pacing the same predetermined route, they actually searched for you and looked around the area. Perhaps a panic meter that attracts animatronics the more it grows would have encouraged you to actually try to be stealthy rather than relying on your ability to book it across the room and immediately lose whatever was chasing you. When you die it will almost never be fair. You will always die to some tomfuckery, either in general or during one of Security Breach's random difficulty spikes.
Speaking of which: the difficulty. This game was piss easy except for, like, two sections that were extremely difficult. Don't get me wrong, I love me a difficult game, but these sections were difficult in the sense that they were annoying and stupid. The game doesn't progressively ramp up in difficulty as the night goes on. You basically just run around the pizzaplex doing the storyline quests until the night ends. The difficult sections, namely the West Arcade and the one segment where you turn on the Showtime CD, come completely out of left field and are difficult purely because of poor design. Both areas suffer from chokeholding you down a path with no places to duck behind or sneak around. Monty will either dogpile you trying to flip the switch on the first floor of the West Arcade or he will dogpile you as you sprint for your life to the main stage. Both of these segments got extremely tiresome and annoying very quickly. I suspect these parts were hard on accident, because the game immediately goes back to being piss easy after you're done with them.
The story was horrid. Maybe this is due to the fact that I am a major FNaF oldhead. I have been shaking my angry fist at Sister Location since it released and I think the series would have ended perfectly if it stopped at FNaF 4. This is mostly Sister Location's fault for setting the precedent, but Security Breach feels wholly sanitized. For a game series that revolves around the concept of a serial killer, this game sure does feel like a narrative hospital. It's completely sterile and lacking in the grimy, gross, and unsettling environment and storytelling I would expect from a series about dead people. I'm not saying that Security Breach should have been nothing but guts and gore, because i think horror media like that is equally terrible storytelling, but you have to at least *try* to make a *horror* game scary. As is typical FNaF storytelling, the actual lore implications Security Breach introduced were confusing and frustrating. There were retroactive changes made to better fit Security Breach, such as the FNaF 6 Pizzeria now not actually completely burning down and Burntrap being retconned to be the Mimic. There is no way you can convince me that Steel Wool always intended to make Burntrap the Mimic. They saw the bad press they got for bringing back William Afton for the billionth time and made a quick switch to save whatever lore integrity they had left. I largely blame Scott for the poor narrative, as apparently he didn't even tell Steel Wool what the story was supposed to be like and they just had to wing it.
Finally, the bugs. Back in 2021 your experience with Security Breach would vary wildly with how many bugs you encountered. Aside from the occasional lag spike I got from poor optimization or strange hitbox collision, I didn't experience bugs very often.
There were parts that this game did pretty well. I think the sewer boss fight with shattered Chica and the Daycare section were great. I loved that they were dark, cramped environments, as Security Breach often struggles with feeling scary. A large percentage of the game, as nice as it may look, is too well lit and spacious, so the parts that were appropriately cramped quickly generated a lot of suspense and were welcome breaks from the normal Security Breach tedium.
While I understand that this game is a project with a complicated history, ultimately, the finished product is what is going to shape the most of the player's opinion, and this is not a good product. For $40 and 90 GB you will have a horror experience that is okay at its best and offensively bad at its worst. I don't think this is the worst FNaF game. That title will always belong to Sister Location unless Steel Wool seriously fucks up later down the line, but this is a real contender for one of the worst FNaF games. Hopefully a flop like Security Breach provided valuable experience for Steel Wool when it comes to tackling large projects, because this one was a real stinkarooni.
(For those who are somehow still reading and are curious to what I am going to say about Ruin: standard fare walking simulator with no interesting gameplay going on. It was offensively linear and some of the cool environments I was excited to see, like the collapsed atrium, ended up getting screwed over visually by the AR mechanic. It looks pretty cool, and I'm glad they found a use for most of that unused content, but I wasn't particularly impressed.)