LogFAQs > #932620732

#42





Years of release: 2017-2018 (PC early access), 2018-present (PC/PS4/XB1/Switch)
Beaten?: Yes, up to 4 BC

I am of the opinion that roguelikes, and other games of that nature (like this one), live two lives; one during the first 50 hours of play, and one from the 50th hour of gameplay onwards. Good roguelikes are great for the first 50 hours - GREAT roguelikes are great after the first 50 hours. Dead Cells is a good roguelike.

The first ten hours or so of this game are truly transcendant, and I believe that corresponds strongly to this game having such a great critic response, since that's the most you'll need to play to be convinced of its worth. And I mean, it's high on my list for a reason - my first 10 hours with this game were TRULY excellent. This game is a tour de force of exciting action, great visuals, and fun randomness and discovery. I can scarcely think of a game that controls as responsively or as fun as this one; I'm typically not a fan of this sort of action game but in this case I adore this game. Running and jumping and attacking all feel so fluid and that alone is a huge selling point; it doesn't take much for this game to make you feel like a combat expert, and the game just sort of naturally expects you to speedrun it, which I'm more than happy to take it up on. Discovering all these new weapons and upgrades feels great, and you get into that fun feedback loop of gathering cells to purchase new weapons and upgrades with, which you use to gather cells with - it's always addictive to unlock a whole shitload of shit in a roguelike.

After some time though, this game started to lose a little bit of its luster for me for a couple of reasons. Now, keep in mind that I haven't played this game in a while, and apparently they're still doing pretty regular content updates, which confuses me - is this game still in early access or not? It's confusing to me because at the time of me sort of exhausting this game, it had been "released", but the game still felt incomplete. It felt like there needed to be more areas, and definitely more boss fights - at least one major area didn't have its own boss last time I played, which was really bizarre. I also found the weapon selection to be lacking - a lot of weapons are just too slow and unwieldy to ever be useful in this fast-paced game, and almost everything paled in comparison to Ice Shard, a medium-ranged weapon that comes out with no windup and no delay, hits things in a very broad arc, slows down what it hits, and does reasonable damage, especially if it crits something covered in oil. In general, it feels like tactics weapons are really the bread and butter here as opposed to brutality or survival weapons. Also, since the mutations you get aren't random, I had a strong tendency to pick the same ones and ignore ones I didn't like, which sort of discourages experimentation. All in all, I wound up bored of this game faster than I got bored of other roguelikes and other procedurally-generated games higher on this list.

Maybe these issues were fixed in updates to the game, I haven't played it in maybe 9 months or so? Something like that. I hate to focus on the stuff I didn't like, that just tends to dominate the conversation with this game since I really DID like it so much, but I didn't LOVE it. It's hard not to recommend this game for the first 50 hours though, which is still plenty of time to enjoy the hell out of a game before I feel like it's spent. For me, the honeymoon with this game was AMAZING, but the marriage fell apart after a while.