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| Dead Cells by Rafiki 08/06/2017, 9:09pm PDT | ||||
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Dead Cells is a rogue-lite, metroidvania action-platformer. You'll explore a sprawling, ever-changing castle... assuming you’re able to fight your way past its keepers in 2D souls-lite combat. No checkpoints. Kill, die, learn, repeat. I bought this game even though it has TWO qualities I normally wouldn't pay for: It's an early access game and it's a rogue-like. I generally don't like rogue-likes, because the randomly generated worlds, to me, are always much more tedious and boring then well-designed levels. I saw a stream of it, it looked well-made for what's there so far, so I decided to try it out. Not bad! That's actually high praise considering how much I don't like rogue-likes. The controls are really good, and the weapons and items make for pretty fun hack and slash combat. The enemy hordes, while not terribly sophisticated (with one or two exceptions), overall make for good combat fodder and get difficult enough in the later stages. The random level generation is pretty decent, and hasn't felt like a boring chore yet. They've actually struck a pretty good balance. When you die, you lose everything and start over, but you can unlock abilities that let you keep gold, start with better weapons than the defaults, and provide permanent damage upgrades to weapons and items so it's not a complete demoralizing loss. There's only 2 bosses so far. First one is pretty easy, second one is pretty hard. It'll probably take you a couple of hours to get accustomed to the game, and then you can do a full run in about an hour. If they keep up the level of quality with whatever new content they're going to add. then this will probably turn out to be pretty good overall. The comparison to Dark Souls is just name-dropping for the sake of marketing. It's about as difficult as Rogue Legacy, and it makes as much sense as calling that game Souls-lite. If there's any comparison, it's that it adopted the dodge roll with 100% damage avoidance. It also took Bloodborne's attacking to restore health after taking damage mechanic. It also has Castlevania doors, for the sake of reminding you of Castlevania. They don't separate levels, they're just part of the them. Artwork is pretty good and could be much prettier, but they decided to go pixelated. I hope there's an actual technical reason, and not just as deliberate art "style." Why are people undercutting good artwork just for stupid fucking nostalgia? Can we all just admit that pixelation sucked? Who was honestly nostalgic for old, shitty graphic limitations? Can we hurry up and fast-track nostalgia for 2000s obsession with achieving anti-aliased crystal clear graphics? The main character animation is great. The fluidity reminds me of Flashback. Is this good animation direction, or is it another nostalgic callback? With all of the namedropping and pandering (like a tentacle modeled after Day of the Tentacle), it's a tough call. Music is also pretty good. |
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Dead Cells by 08/06/2017, 9:09pm PDT  Metroidvania by 08/08/2017, 8:11am PDT Three Metroids! There was one for the Gameboy by 08/08/2017, 8:29am PDT Simon's Quest WAS a terrible game! by 08/08/2017, 9:24am PDT Metroidvania is one of those words that gets thrown around proportionately to by 08/08/2017, 9:48am PDT Just got it. I'm liking it too. by 03/09/2018, 5:04pm PST |
