Deadlight is another Xbox Live Games with Gold download.
Zombie Apocalypse games are nothing new, but I hadn’t played one in a 2D
side-scrolling platform game before and I thought it would be interesting to
see this take on it.
I set myself a different challenge this time: Get through
the game without looking at any of the achievement trophies. This is because
I’ve ruined games before by playing them and looking for the achievement
points; they’re nice to get, and I won’t usually get rid of a game until I’ve
got all that are possible, but they take away some enjoyment of the game if
you’re too pedantic about it.
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| This is the title screen; even the music that accompanies this is bleak and tragic... |
The game puts you in control of Randall Wayne, who’s teamed
up with a group of survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse in search of his missing
family. At the start of the game you’re separated from the group, and you have
to run, jump and fight your way through the horde of Zombies – in this game
called Shadows – to reunite with your team and your family. That is, of course,
if any have survived…
For those of us who remember the 80s and the 90s,
side-scrolling platform games were the standard back then. They lost touch once
3d gaming came in; platforming was quite difficult to pull off accurately in 3d
environments and not many games managed it. But they never went away either. In
the early 00’s we had emulation. In the mid/late 00’s we had retro-gaming. And
in the previous/current generation, they seem to be… not making a comeback;
there has been a definite shift in what is considered to be mainstream, but
they have a strong presence in the sub-triple-A market.
With this new surge of platform games, some elements have
stayed the same across the generations, others have changed. What has remained
is art style, in that every platform game worth its code has its own
distinctive look and feel to it. And Deadlight is BLEAK. The backgrounds look
worn down and hopeless, the character models are barely more than silhouettes
and the soundtrack evokes misery and despair. The cut-scenes are graphic
novel-style drawings and subtitles that remind me, more than anything else, of
Watchmen. It makes you feel that, even if you do get to the end of the game,
surviving is as good as it is going to get for your character and anybody
fortunate enough last to the end.
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| See what I mean? Bleak. |
What has changed from the old platform games is combat. The combat
mechanics of platform games have never been complicated, but in new games, the
emphasis seems to be taken away from the combat and put on the exploration and
platforming. That works well for Deadlight, which boasts a very small number of
enemy types; munching your way through zombie hordes gets old at the best of
times and is presumably incredibly dull if you can only do it in two
dimensions. In Deadlight, you have an axe, a pistol and a shotgun at the very
most, and very limited ammunition for the latter two. You avoid combat as much
as possible; aiming is quite tricky and you don’t swing the axe very fast. You
can’t take many hits before you die, and you’ll find yourself blaming the
clunky controls for the occasional plummet, or a missed shot that costs you the
game. It creates a challenge where you have to think about what you’re doing in
order to proceed; more satisfying than ‘kill everything in the room then go on
to the next bit.’
Yet for all that, I can’t decide whether I enjoyed the game.
It’s a great game, no doubt about that. It’s a well presented; if not entirely
fresh take on an idea that’s becoming stale now. The art style carries it for
the most part, and telling a single story that’s over in a few hours is a
refreshing change of pace. But my word, it is depressing. Any sense of
achievement you gain from completing the levels and objectives is subsequently
crushed by the heavy atmosphere and the feeling that no matter what you do,
you’re only delaying the inevitable…
I might go back to this later to look for all the
achievement points, but for now I’ll move on to something more cheery.
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