Welcome to the start of a new article series call “Android 20 or Less”. This will be a new review column where Garrett and I will take a look at budget games, priced $20 or less. We’ll still cover the bigger stuff as it comes out, but being situated between a Game Stop, Best Buy and Toys R Us gives us plenty of access to budget games that keep us entertained between major releases. In this first installment, I’ll take a look at the X-Box Live Arcade Game: Deadlight.
Just from the opening, I can tell it’s a game that I’ll be cranking the brightness up on.
Deadlight is a platformer set in a post zombie apocalypse 1980s Seattle. That’s really all you need to know about the setting, the rest of the story is pretty weak and standard stuff a zombie fan could wright on day one. Man is looking for his family… blah blah blah… unexplained cause of zombies … blah blah blah … some military jerks do jerk stuff proving that humans are the real monsters. The End. Yeah, don’t play this for the story, play it for the setting.
The gameplay is part platforming and part puzzle solving. Usually all that you need to do is get from one end of the stage to the other. The zombies (called Shadows in game), are just another obstacle, and typically a fatal one. You are given some weapons and attacks, but unless you are encountering a lone Shadow it is best to just keep away from them. The biggest challenge is the stamina bar, which depletes as you run, jump and attack through the stage. Expend yourself too much at once and you’ll leave yourself vulnerable.
So for a game that is 90% platforming, I have to say that the control of the character is not very spot on. I remember thinking as I was playing that if the game had the precision of Super Mario Brothers 3 (a game released in 1988, pretty much in the time frame of Deadlight itself), it would be a lot less frustrating and more playable. I can’t help but wonder why a game that was released almost 25 years ago has much better controls than a game released in 2012! An example of what I’m talking about would be having my character standing under a ladder and desperately jumping in all kinds of directions just to grab it. It gets much worse when you have to platform across chasms.
There are a few different collectibles in the game, mostly just crap that unlocks more terrible backstory to the “plot”. If you so chose to go after the collectibles, you’ll find yourself constantly banging against and checking out nondescript walls just to see if you can walk through them. That,s how a majority of the collectibles are hidden. For a platformer, it would’ve made more sense to put the collectibles in plain sight, like in Super Meat Boy, with the challenge being to actually get to them rather than dicking around with the stage graphics.
It’s hard to find images of the game that are bright enough to show you what’s going on.
On the plus side, the graphics and environments do look amazing. Shadows in the background can shamble up to the foreground if you get their attention. Like I said at the beginning, the setting is the best thing going for this game. As a side note, the final stage occurs in Ft. Lawton, a small military base in Seattle where I lived for a few years. While not an exact or accurate recreation, I could see elements of the actual base and area where I used to pretend I was in a video game. It must be how people who live in New York City feel everyday.
Overall, I’d say a decent attempt and so close to a good distraction, that unfortunately just falls short. It’s about $15 on X-Box Live, but I’d save that for something more polished and better thought out. Later BroZ!
