TeleGlitch: Die More Edition Review

Have you ever thought, “Dead space would be awesome as a top down shooter with PlayStation one graphics”, well don’t worry Paradox Interactive have you covered with TeleGlitch: Die More Edition. A creepy survival horror game, with some randomly generated rouge-like sprinkled on top, set top down in space. You are aboard a research ship building an unlimited teleporter, able to teleport someone across the galaxy in an instant, as the name implies, unfortunately something has come through, it’s black, it looks like a void and if you touch it your head explodes. Of course it now floating around most of the ship and to top it off all the combat robots and damn zombies are out to kill you. To take on the challenge the game gives you a knife and a pistol, what did you expect for a survival horror game.

So we have a catastrophic event that has occurred, and your character has tried to hide from it all and wait for rescue, well now you’ve ran out of food and it’s time to go exploring, you are poorly armed and very out manned. If you want to know more of the story, you can find out by reading the many computer terminals that slowly start to explain and unveil the story of what happened, the slow pacing is nice and builds up the tension well.

First thing you will notice in this game is the graphics, or lack thereof, the game starts off with a mimic of DOS, and getting into the game your playable character is nothing more than three moving blocks. The mood that this game sets with its graphical choices is subtle at first, it all comes together, with a lack of much music, and only hearing the noise of machines and static when coming too close to the black void. Add this to the fact there is no sound or visual cues to when you are about to be attacked by a swarm of enemies all adds up to a surprisingly tense and sometimes creepy game, the atmosphere here is very well done.

Of course survival horror needs good game mechanics to back up the setting to be enjoyable, and we have that here was well. For fighting this new unknown enemy, it is simple, left click to attack with your knife and right click to aim your gun, you get a nice little effect when you fire them too, different for each gun. You will find more weapons as you walk around, you can also find parts to upgrade the guns you already have. In fact the crafting system was very fun and interesting, my personal favourite is the CanGun, which is a mix of Nails and Explosives inside an empty can, high damage but also causes damage to the user. Whilst the different guns are great for different mobs, ammo is sparse, and if you are in a particularly unlucky streak, you can easily waste a lot of ammo on larger weak mobs when you could pick them off with your knife, something I found out the hard way. This is also where the rouge-like element most comes into play, random map layout, weapons, ammo and pick up placement each run can make some runs extremely challenging, my first run I was swamped with shot gun shells, until I was overwhelmed by the desire to touch the black void.

Of course because of the rouge-like aspects, difficulty in this game is very random, and can be easy or crushingly difficult, the previously mentioned CanGun(This needs to be In more games) is unsurprisingly effective against boss fights, and the first time I went up against one, I had 4 stock piled and a bunch of health items which made short work of it, on another run through I had very little in the way of health items and had most of my ammo for my un-upgraded pistol, needless to say I was killed promptly and efficiently. The randomness of this is why I really took a liking to this game, I am a big fan of rouge-likes, and it’s nice to see a game capture that pure random nature of the difficulty, with some recent ones forgetting this.

The level structure while random, you do have choices, at the end of each floor you can find a computer which tells you where the teleporters in that room go, a quick read will be able to explain what you will find there, going to a military area will be flooded with more enemies, but I found much more ammo there. There are also multiple levels to unlock, 1 through to 19, though these are just checkpoints that are unlocked by getting to a certain stage in the game, it is nice to have this with how unforgiving the game is, knowing I can just continue form a certain stage is great news.

This game is very different to what I would usually play, and I would defiantly not consider the game to be a rouge-like without playing it. The atmosphere in this game is amazing, and I found myself being drawn into this game much more easily than I have in some other AAA titles that are first or third person, let alone a top down game like this. For all that the game gets 5/5, for making a truly unique game, and if you are interested remember that if you grab before the 31 July you get access to some nice extra weapons, though they will probably be released later for a small fee.

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.