Dead Cells brings a lot of interesting ideas to the platformer genre, however, it falls short of anything special in its execution. Prior to playing it I heard comparisons to Metroidvanias and Dark Souls, and honestly it's nothing like those games at its core. Strip away the superficial, and what you have is a basic hack, slash, and shoot platformer with "levels" and a few bosses. In a normal universe its the equivalent of an NES platformer you'd beat in about an hour.
What makes Dead Cells' universe different is they made it literally impossible to beat the first time you play it, or the 50th time you play it. Reason being, the game forces you to use Cells you get from killing enemies to create new powers and weapons that are essential to survive so the enemies can't kill you in 2 seconds. The catch is that you lose the Cells you've earned if you don't make it to the collector at the end of a level because you died.
This where people will compare it to Dark Souls, however, in DS you have one chance to reclaim your lost souls, and in this game you can't. Along with losing Cells, you actually lose everything else you've earned including strength scrolls, blueprints, weapons, and money (unless you have a certain upgrade which allows you to retain some). Now the weapons aren't lost forever, you just won't restart with them and getting them back is completely random...derrr.
And this where things start to get bad, not only are the reclaiming of scrolls and weapons random, so are the levels each time you play. In a way I understand it, if you are forced to play the same levels 1,000 times, it adds variety to make them randomly generated so it doesn't get stale. My issue with random levels has always been them feeling so generic and unpolished, and well...stale. A randomly generated level will never feel like one crafted by a designer to be something unique and special. Think about some of your favorite levels you played in different video games.
Beside the levels being very lackluster, the bosses are horribly lame. One of the best things, if not the best, about a good platformer is fun, intimidating, and well-designed boss fights. This game has none of those things, the bosses are only marginally bigger than your character, rather uninteresting, and just move back and forth spamming the same attacks. The thing that makes them hard is how much damage they deal and how little you do to them when you fight them.
While the game has a lot of problems, it does have some bright spots, most notably its depth and complexity to the weapons and builds. Every time you play Dead Cells, it can essentially be a new game from how you choose to approach it build-wise. This can be fun and add replay value to the experimentation, however, if you actually like a certain build you had it can be annoying as hell when you can't get those same weapons and stats back for awhile, so it's a double-edge sword. At the end of the day, there is more than one way to beat the game, so all hope isn't lost, it just can add a lot of frustration and tedium to an already tedious experience. Thankfully, the gameplay is very fluid and fast, which is the main thing that will actually keep the player coming back again and again for punishment.
What made a game like Dark Souls special, however, is the balance to the risk-reward system. Venture too far and carelessly and you can lose all your hard-earned souls, but if you do survive you get to use those souls to continue building on this unique character you created. That's totally lost here as you essentially lose everything you were building when you die, only throwing a couple pieces of it back into the pit of random and starting from scratch in a new game. So the reward-risk dynamic is unbalanced and becomes irrelevant as you only retain the little things you've unlocked from cells and the "learning experience" of what did and didn't work in the levels and against bosses. Which the latter is part of any game, honestly.
Dead Cells tries something different and I can appreciate that, no one wants to play the same game over and over. Different, however, doesn't always mean good and while the hype train can make things feel like that sometimes, when the train passes and dust settles, a lot of players will be left feeling cheated out of a really well-designed experience due to the overwhelming "randomness". But that's me, some people will argue the beauty is in the randomness.
Ultimately, the draw of this game and the demographic that should buy it are those looking for a challenge. It doesn't do anything particularly well except the lightning fast gameplay, so those looking for a rich and enjoyable journey that rewards exploration like Ori and Blind Forest or Axiom Verge, won't find it here. What makes it worthwhile of the time you will invest in it is the reward of beating something that is really hard. That's it. Which isn't to say is a bad reason, because that's what made me keep playing it. I love a challenge.
Also if you're the type that just wants bang for their buck and you enjoy platformers, this could be a worthwhile investment. $30 for let's say 30 hours of game time seems like good value, as long as you don't break the game in half. But I can take a game like Ninja Gaiden on the NES which only takes about 30 minutes to beat, and have beaten it over 40 times due to its amazing design and polish, and still play it to this day even though it was released 30 years ago. I find much more value in that, personally. Dead Cells had a lot of potential, unfortunately some poor design choices hold it back from becoming true art and not just exercise.
| Manufacturer | Merge Games |
|---|---|
| Part Number | 819335020269 |
| Item Weight | 1.58 ounces |
| Product Dimensions | 0.6 x 5.3 x 6.7 inches |
| Item model number | 819335020269 |
| Is Discontinued By Manufacturer | No |
| Color | Original Version |
| Item Package Quantity | 1 |
| Batteries Included? | No |
| Batteries Required? | No |
