Deadlight (PC) Review

Deadlight, the favourite child of XBLA’s Summer of Arcade, has finally found its way over to Steam. Can I get a “Hell, yeah!”

Everything the game does from the start screams of cool. It’s a gritty survival horror sidescrolling game with veritable oodles of atmosphere (You heard me, OODLES) that takes place in zombie-ridden 80’s Seattle. You play Randall Wayne, a hard bitten, neckbearded survivor who has to hack, shoot, and outwit his way across the zombie apocalypse to find his long lost wife and child.

First of all, playing as Wayne is pretty different to playing the action men of more widespread zombie titles, he’s a man past his prime, still capable of kicking ass here and there and a crack shot with a pistol, but Leon S. Kennedy he’s definitely not, making use of whatever he can in the environment to make his life a little easier. More often than not the only way to survive a zombie onslaught is to flee it and block doors behind you.

This carries across well – Wayne’s health bar isn’t exactly robust, and he quite quickly runs out of stamina if you’re trying to use a fire axe to push a horde of zombies back or hanging onto a bar above a deadly drop. Strangely enough, it makes the game feel more realistic than other games that plunge you straight into the action. In a similar vein, if you want to sprint across a road crawling with the undead, you’re going to have to find places to lay low and recover your stamina so you can make the next stretch. If you need to kill a zombie with your fire axe to get to a door, you’re going to have to pick your target quickly and carefully. The game’s line of sight mechanic ensures you never know what’s ahead of you so you have to think on your feet if you want to survive, and the best ways of doing so are by running and outwitting the monsters that pursue you. Most of your zombie kills will be environment driven – dropping trash on their heads, luring them onto electrified surfaces, or into the paths of other humans. It’s like an extremely intense puzzle game, and that’s just figuring out how to get from A to B.

Combat boils down to an extremely simple combination of a fire axe and a six shooter, both of which having environmental uses too, like breaking open windows or removing padlocks. Shooting is as simple as aiming for the head and the fire axe proves capable of holding back zombies one at a time, but this isn’t a game about prolonged fights – this is a game about running, and making it from one level to the next. If more than one zombie piles in on Wayne, he gets pulled under pretty quickly, so at the best of times you’ll be looking at shoving a few Shadows back while you make a run for it. Shooting and hacking feels weighted and desperate, testing your brain as well as your reflexes and forcing you to make vital fight or flight decisions. None of the puzzles are really that taxing due to the linear nature of the entire game but the survival edge, implemented neatly without crude timers, makes them seem incredibly intense at times.

It’s a shame, then, that its story and characterization don’t stack up to the exemplary gameplay. Wayne really is just a vehicle for the player, and his lost wife and child a likely MacGuffin -especially when you consider the game’s ending (Which I won’t spoil for you here). They become less and less relevant as the story trundles on, represented inbetween the 2D platforming sections by graphic novel style cutscenes. These are pretty sparse despite looking slick, leaving the story unfortunately thin on top. No-one goes into a sidescrolling game expecting buckets of story but when it feels as atmospheric as Deadlight does, it makes the absence all the more obvious. The glaring lack of any substantial story could be a detriment if you need story with your zombies, but if all you’re looking for from Deadlight is a great side-scrolling platform game with a unique survival twist, look no further – it’s the first of its kind, and hopefully not the last.

Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.