Top down shooters have long been the domain of cobbled-together indie titles, to the extent it’s becoming near impossible to differentiate between titles. In a market so infatuated (and therefore saturated) with charming little independent efforts, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff – chiefly because of the sheer amount of chafe there is.
Despite all that cynicism, I attempted to go into Deadstone with a fairly open mind. And what I found was something that both met my pessimistic, almost hipsterish indie expectations and simultaneously massively confused them.
It’s about as cookie cutter as it gets. You progress from level to level shooting zombies and upgrading weapons and whatnot as you go, visiting a shop in-between levels. It all works, which is fantastic – but it’s just lacking something. It felt very much just like going through the motions. The dialogue was good, but after a while I just started speeding through it to expedite the process. Click. Shoot a few zombies by clicking. Click again, until you’re sick of it. Any attempts to mix it up a little bit become routine all too quickly, and it just doesn’t seem worth sticking it out.
The plot itself is the same old zombies in space melodrama we’ve all sat through time and time again. But while the plot itself is uninspired to say the least, the written dialogue between characters is a real strong point. Everything happens from the top-down, static perspective, but the writing does a lot to bring the interludes between levels to life. The trouble is there’s just not enough to keep you going through the mud, boring terrain and ultimately facile dialogue. Yes, you can get new guns and explosives to kill the enemies faster. But that’s ultimately pointless if you don’t feel like there’s any reason to play in the first place. Most of the elements are there. It’s just missing one big central point to glue it all together. You’re told you’re defending a colony, but the closer you get to hear about it is the vague passive aggression of the other survivors on the planet. There doesn’t seem to be a solid reason for your character to be there in the first place, just some convenient MacGuffin put the gruff, mysterious action hero in the right place at the right time.
The visuals are decent enough, but basic – and when the rest of the game is as bare-bones as it gets, the same old muddy ground starts to become sickening. “The infected have learnt how to burrow!” the game tells me as an X appears on my radar and a handful of grunting zombies pop out of it. It feels like Gears of War via Newgrounds, and not in a good way. Even on the more challenging night-time maps you’re literally treading the same old ground with a slightly less visible sorry patch of mud to defend.
If Deadstone wants to make more of an impact, it needs to become more complex. It needs to show you what you’re defending and the impact you’re having on it – even if it’s just through some little text menu. Because in my time in Deadstone, all I did was stand on a dirt road firing a pea-shooter at faceless zombies, like some horrible gaming consumerist nightmare. Perhaps it’s some sort of allegory for the trouble indie games face when corporate monsters shamble towards their pride and joy, mindlessly cannibalising it and adding it to the horde. Maybe – and more likely – it’s just a tiny bit uninspired.
Deadstone has a decent amount of heart behind it. But as it stands, it’s little more than a glorified flash game. In fact, that’s my greatest takeaway from my time with the game – the nostalgia it induced for the glory days of playing little web games on Newgrounds and its kin. Ultimately, you’re left with a slightly bland taste in your mouth and the question “Why would anyone spend real money on this?” burning in your head. Not in a cruel, sneering way, but in a slightly bewildered fashion. There are literally thousands of games in this vein available free online or via a freemium model on your smartphone market of choice. Deadstone does nothing better or worse. There’s no spectacular, shining point of sale. A skeleton of a game that might become something interesting if it fleshes out a little more.
A good effort. But ultimately, a very, very small fish in a gigantic, overpopulated pond.
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