Dead Cells is a simulator of an insect and rodent exterminator in the dungeons of a prison island, which the developers are trying to pass off as a roguelike with Metroidvania elements. The game was clearly designed to use turrets and traps – it’s a tower defense with procedurally generated rooms and corridors instead of the usual paths with monsters for the genre. All other elements were attached to this basic mechanics retroactively – they are completely unnecessary in the game.
Dead Cells enjoys a very good reputation on Steam and has earned accolades from Western critics. Both are easily explained.
Firstly, during the year the game was in Early Access, the developers from Motion Twin did nothing but fanservice for hardcore bagel fans. According to the chief designer, 50% of the content in Dead Cells was influenced by user feedback. As a result, I find it difficult to name another game of any genre into which the authors managed to squeeze such a huge number of combat mechanics for extremely narrow categories of players.
Secondly, Dead Cells can be guaranteed to be completed “from start to finish” within the 20-30 hours allotted for familiarizing yourself with the game and writing a review – an extremely rare quality for a full-scale roguelike.
At first glance, Dead Cells has everything that the game is so praised for: retro pixel art with modern special effects, music stylized to all your favorite fantasy games at once, a huge combat mechanism that is precise to the last pixel and incredible complexity that can crush even a veteran of the genre. I’ll talk about art and music at the very end, as the least controversial (but also not anything outstanding) elements. First, let’s deal with the local pseudo-combat and the difficulty of passing.
The range of weapons and combat mechanics is amazing – in addition to the usual swords, axes and firearms (which are disguised here as “crossbows-shotguns” and “machine guns”) there are shields “like in Dark Souls”, whips straight from Castlevania and even the ability to kick enemies with spiked boots, as in the cult eight-bit hit of 1992 Kick Master.
Weapons can be upgraded and loaded with random effects, as a result of which the opposition dies not just like that, but in agony. Bleeding, suffering from poisoning and being eaten by predatory worms – and also in fire, ice and under the effect of slowing down. Each sword, bow or whip is endowed with its own fighting style – we have not yet begun to deal with the return of arrows and the system of blocks and parries.
This whole pile of weapons junk obviously came to the game “by popular demand”. Nothing is balanced. Some things work great from the first level, some require an immediate upgrade or long training, and without a number of mechanics (the same shields or magic) in Dead Cells, all but the most stubborn fans of this type of passage would do just fine. But this in itself is not so bad – at least the developers have done a great job on the animations and physics of using combat junk. The tactile feel of the game is equally pleasant to use both the smallest bow and the huge war hammer.
The first suspicions creep in when you reach the final boss without ever using the fire button. They become stronger when you repeat the entire process without ever touching the strike button. And when you reach the last boss without NEVER touching one or the other button… There’s no getting around it: despite all the laudatory reviews from grateful players, there’s something fundamentally wrong with the game’s combat system.
The thing is that the arsenal of the Dead Cells hero is not limited to weapons. It has two slots for auxiliary equipment – traps or grenades. Grenades with various effects are another completely unnecessary mechanic in the game for a narrow category of players, so we will not consider them and will focus on traps.
These are classic turrets and traps, circular saws and other devices that delay or tear apart the enemy from mobile games, in which a long line of leisurely zombies is walking towards you along the path. I hate tower defense and didn’t even think about using traps – I was going to play Dead Cells like Bloodborne, with rolls and the lightest weapons. But after one or two hundred shameful deaths, I still tried to install an automatic disc thrower from a circular saw and before I knew it, I completely stopped using weapons.
This is not a passing https://healthgamescasino.co.uk/withdrawal/ style – this is a universal tactic that works anytime and anywhere except the very last battle, where you are deliberately locked in a cramped room with an army of elite enemies. In the fight against ordinary opponents, you jump into a room, set two traps, roll back and calmly wait while the flamethrower and circulars process the contents of the room. In a boss fight, you throw an automatic crossbow and a saw in a strategically advantageous position and completely focus on avoiding enemy attacks while the traps damage.
It all comes down to an existential dilemma: if you fight on your own, sooner or later you will be killed, and this is permadeath and a rather long (10 minutes per boss) replay of the entire game. If you use traps, you can only die if there is a gross violation of safety precautions when using dungeon clearing tools.
They also worked a lot on the enemies in Dead Cells, planning unpleasant surprises for a variety of categories of players. Do you like to run through the level as quickly as possible – there are teleporting opponents who will catch up and hack you in the back. You weigh every action and spend a long time studying the routes of your enemies – sooner or later a grenade or a small phasing leech will arrive.
The damage from the most trifling blow in Dead Cells is so monstrous, and special means for restoring life take so long and painfully to open that hand-to-hand combat, and combat in general, is an unacceptable risk.
If you have mastered jumping-rolls and can competently jump in and out of an area filled with evil spirits, placing a trap there, 90% of the dangers disappear. What remains are the teleporting beasts (mostly elite opponents), but they can also be intelligently “received” by moving traps into a new corridor and dragging monsters chasing you back and forth along it to no avail.
The very concept of permadeath, and the rogue genre as a whole, was invented in order to evoke maximum adrenaline in the player. The feeling of flying on the crest of a wave, balancing on a razor blade in those few minutes or even seconds when you managed to level up, find normal weapons, armor, amulets and feel like the coolest in the whole maze.
This won’t last long – you’ll be killed or you’ll beat the game. Everything will have to start from scratch (in roguelikes – practically from scratch). But these seconds of survival in a world where everyone wants and can finish you off with one or two blows cannot be compared to anything in video games in terms of intensity, this is the reason for the popularity of the genre among both veterans and newcomers. What difference does it make whether they killed you on the first level or on the last boss… you got the charge.
In Dead Cells, such emotions arise only in one case – when you first come to an unfamiliar level and don’t know what the local enemies are capable of. The designers throw up quite a few pleasantly sneaky tricks: somewhere the levels are generated horizontally, somewhere vertically, somewhere there are always huge honeycombs in which nothing awaits except enemies and death, somewhere you need to go into other randomly generated layers and look there for the key to the door in the original labyrinth.
But all this works until you draw a map of the level and understand the principle of its generation. When you know where the exit, secrets and the most dangerous “elites” will be located, passing the level turns into a monotonous, safe clearing with traps. Moreover, if you suddenly have to enter into battle due to some unforeseen circumstances, it turns out that even your basic skills in using a sword and bow have already atrophied!
The game has a lot of upgrades and mutations that improve character characteristics, of which you will have to use one or two. Everything else is useless trash, an illusion of content that is needed only so that there is something to open. It is clearly visible here that Dead Cells was made by professional mobile game developers. Compare: one mutation resurrects you right on the spot, the other… well, gives +75 to the damage dealt, subject to certain, very specific conditions for the location of enemies.
In the second half of any playthrough, the Dead Cells infrastructure turns into a dead city of shops where you no longer have anything to buy, NPCs that give out mutations and upgrades that you don’t need, and stations for restoring health, which you already have full. A couple of good traps and good effects for them are enough. I don’t know what better symbolizes the fundamental flaws in game design than a health station in one of the later levels, the sight of which does not evoke any emotion in the player.
And one last thing: the creators of Dead Cells completely failed the main fork in the mechanics of roguelike games: “risk vs reward”. Because after each level and before each boss the game gives you a chance to fully restore your health. There is no incentive to not level up and take risks, completing levels as quickly as possible in order to face a boss or a more difficult dungeon in good shape.
In Enter the Gungeon, let’s say, each room is the subject of painful calculations, calculating whether there will be enough weapons and ammo for one of that particular clip of bosses. If there is clearly not enough, you have to stay longer at the level, risking reaching the boss with a solid arsenal, but absolutely no health.
In Dead Cells you just need to methodically level up, go through the same boring levels for the hundredth time without any risk, collecting upgrades in order to reach the final boss with a sufficiently long lifebar and powerful weapons or protection.
Battles follow the same pattern. First, the boss is a leisurely goofball with childish patterns. Then he starts spamming AoE attacks and creeps in quicker succession. In the end, it accelerates STILL, making it impossible to read attacks and react to them in a timely manner. As a result, “going through everything with the default crossbow” (as in Enter the Gungeon) will not work; only three outcomes of the battle are possible:
- You’ve upgraded enough so that the boss doesn’t have time to kill you, and traps crush him.
- You take out the rest of the boss’s health with some superweapon and win without taking damage.
- You’re dead.
You can probably make it more difficult for yourself to complete Dead Cells by basically playing without traps and reaching the final boss for an hour in order to die in those very seconds of chaotic flickering. That’s the only reason to do it?
You’ve already seen the game’s combat mechanics, and besides that, Dead Cells is not able to offer anything. The pixel art is nice, but it seems to me that in 2018 it is stupid to praise artists for the fact that they were more or less acceptable in drawing such typical fantasy locations as “forest”, “castle” and “sewers”. The music will also quickly start to hurt your ears with its blatant borrowings from Diablo (that guitar) and Dark Souls (that choir).
The exception is the level on the clock tower, which, both in design and in the picture with the moon shining through the window, is a phenomenal sight. Even the music is a real work of art, and not just a Castlevania stylization. But he’s alone here.
The game has no plot, only snippets from the work of George R. R. Martin (one of the bosses is called The Hand of the King) with very stupid and inappropriate violations of the “fourth wall”. When the main character says something like: “Well, how am I going to upgrade my crossbow on the whetstone?”? What a crooked game design!!", this violates the immersion, immersion in the atmosphere and world of the game, and indicates not so much the advancement and irony of the authors, but rather the complete lack of text editing.
In fact, there is not even a main character here – only the player’s alter ego in baggy pants and a red tunic, showing the “fakie” of the NPC. The platforming and metroidvania elements are so rare here that they don’t deserve mention at all.
Games like The Binding of Isaac showed that roguelikes can tell amazing stories. Enter the Gungeon proved that even with a minimal story, you can create a brilliant game through uncompromising difficulty and smart, creative and fair boss design. So there is no need to make Dead Cells discounts on the genre, on “that’s how it is in bagels”. Nothing of the kind. The developers simply spent a lot of time on the most insignificant aspects of the game, without making or abandoning halfway through elements that would make the weapon interesting to use on enemies and bosses.
If you buy Dead Cells on Steam, after the initial hype it will be lost in your library. At first, everything may seem addictive, but if you don’t start the game for a couple of days, you most likely will have no reason or desire to return to it. Dead Cells does not intrigue with its history or gradual exploration of the world, does not offer an interesting progression of levels and bosses for which you would want to “go to Conjunctivitus again”. This is just another, not the worst, but absolutely passable “bagel” with an inflated reputation.
It’s not that simple on Switch. Despite the high price on the Nintendo Store, Dead Cells is very playable in handheld mode – in cases where you need to kill 10-20 minutes on something that does not require any mental or physical effort. In this case, this mousetrap laying simulator is perfect – and you will find that you are holding in your hands a real mobile casual game that the developers so carefully disguised.