Fast, Furious, Fun: Dead End Job Review

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Release Date: 12/13/2019
Publisher: Headup Games
Developer: Ant Workshop, LTD
Platform: PC
Price: $16.99

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Sometimes you just need something quick to play. Something addictive and engrossing enough that you can get deep into it, but just light enough that you can disengage if need be. Something that can be played a little casually, but has a lot of depth and action. And directly in that sweet spot is Dead End Job. It’s a roguelike shooter with a ton of style, a good sense of humor, and easy enough controls to learn. But between the variety of enemies, the arcade-style combat, and the large number of perks and items strewn across its levels, it’s far from a basic experience. It’s something fantastic for if you want to get lost for a little while busting ghosts, or if you just need something for a quick burst of gaming.

Dead End Job puts you in the vast overalls of Hector Plasm, a slovenly-looking blue-collar ghostbuster. Hector works for Ghoul-B-Gone, a shady ghost-hunting outfit run out of a small fly-by-night office. When Hector’s partner chokes on a sandwich, he has to save up enough money and complete enough work on a portal to the other side to bring her back from the dead, as outlined in the cheery ‘90s cartoon-style theme song that opens the game. To do this, you go to various locations throughout the city to bust ghosts, shooting them until they’re stunned and then vacuuming them up in your pack. Each ghost you bust is added to your score, represented as an invoice in the corner of the screen. As you try to reach your goal by completing at least one job a “day,” new areas are unlocked at each milestone, allowing you to bust more challenging ghosts and more complicated areas.

There’s a great unified aesthetic to Dead End Job. The dev team set out to make it look as much like a ‘90s Nickelodeon cartoon as possible, and between the loose, gross-out designs and the bold color pallette, it succeeds. Each new level even has its own episode title and credits, popping up as a loading screen as Hector drives his broken-down van to the job site. This is continued in the various stages, all of which have a different theme to them (office buildings, parks, restaurants) with their own variety of ghosts to bust. Even the bosses maintain the theme, with you fighting ghosts possessing sandpits, ghostly babysitters, and huge ice cream cones in the middle of a haunted park. The park’s level design is especially good, with the stage making use of the wide-open spaces and long ranges for some absolutely wild firefights with the destructible scenery adding a nice added dose of mayhem.

And then you add the perks and items. Suddenly what was a simple arcade-style shooter turns into a wild, cartoonish explosion, with things like scenery spontaneously exploding in wads of cash upon clearing a room of ghosts, “coolant holes” that allow your gun/vacuum to fire for longer, or even saving you from losing all your perks upon death. Also aiding you in your quest of ethereal extermination are a variety of throwables, edibles, and extra guns that further clear a room. All of these combine in a variety of interesting ways, allowing you to zip around a level and fill up on ghosts in no time at all.

But there are difficulties, even with such a simple premise. For one thing, movement is incredibly slippery, meaning that you can easily lose control of Hector, even as the game keeps its fast pace. Hector can also tend to get stuck on scenery in places, which in the heat of battle when you have almost bullet hell levels of projectiles coming at you, gets more than a little annoying. While these don’t happen often, it’s enough that when you’re cornered by three enemies, stuck on the corner of a table, and somehow the enemies aren’t similarly impeded. There were also times when my computer forced a quit of the program mid-level only for the game to count it as a loss and start me from zero, and it was really annoying when that happened, even though I get that it discourages rage-quitting. It can also get repetitive in much longer stretches, though this does make it perfect for short to medium bursts instead of sitting down for the long haul. The aesthetic can also be kind of gross, with Hector pelvic-thrusting in the air after every mission, the animation a little too good at showing his movements.

In the end, though, Dead End Job is everything it needs to be— a quick, fast-paced arcade shooter with just enough depth and storyline to keep the player hooked, but nothing that leaves you bogged down or stuck in a grind. It’s fun, with its shabby fly-by-night operation offering a great aesthetic, the unified design of the various stages, and the high score tying into the overall storyline of you trying to raise money so your partner comes back. And that’s not even getting into the co-op, which adds a new dimension to the game and supports local play. It’s addictive, simple, and has a lot of interesting depth and play choices, even if the structure serves short bursts and quick sessions more than longer play. It’s fast, furious, fun, and that’s really all it needs to be.

The Good
- Fast-paced action
- Perfect ‘90s cartoon aesthetic similar to Ren And Stimpy or Klasky-Csupo
- Great level design and some frenetic firefights

The Bad
- Slippery controls, getting stuck on scenery is annoying
- Can get a little repetitive at times

Marble Mountain Review

Marble Mountain, the new game from LightningRock Studios, is relaxing. With its bouncy synth soundtrack, bright color palette, and levels with just the right amount of challenge, it isn't the frustrating grind of most other arcade style games, but offers more challenge and depth than the average casual game. It's the perfect chillout game, the kind of thing you can do when you just need a break from everything. While not without flaws, it's just a low-key, fun game, and that's really all it needs to be. 

Marble Mountain is fairly simple. You guide a marble along mazes, sometimes having to push switches or navigate terrain as you go, occasionally having to solve movement puzzles or navigate around enemies. There are traps and secret passages hidden throughout, and there are optional gold coins to collect for one hundred percent completion. Other than collecting the coins and getting to the end goal, there's not a ton of other things you need to do-- there are, of course, secret marbles to unlock, but overall, it's fairly simple.

And that's all it needs to be. Everything about the game, from the simple controls to the way you're just allowed to explore everywhere, to the soundtrack, is relaxing. Rolling around levels is incredibly satisfying in a way, as it just allows you to slide into a groove for a while as the marble rolls down slopes and around giant gears. It's a game that moves at its own pace, and the dynamic environments allow for that. 

But it's not without flaws, and this is where it's a bit of a letdown. The controls for the marble are beyond slippery, making it a chore to navigate some of the more narrow pathways, and even some of the wider ones. The physics are bizarre, too. Sometimes you can use the d-pad to roll up and down a see-saw, for instance, but other times, the same situation will result in you either falling off for no reason, or send you spiraling to your death. It's also unclear exactly how one is to unlock some of the marbles, other than going through the levels. And while the par time not being any particular object helps the game at a lesiurely pace, it's kind of unclear why it's even there at all.

It's also easy on some stages to get trapped with no way out. There are, of course, ways to restart the level if absolutely necessary, but it's annoying having to go back to the beginning of the level. Further confounding things, switches sometimes go back to being unswitched when you fall off the course, but that isn't a consistent thing across the board, which means that you have to go back and check if you still need to make the necessary movements to progress. It's a lot of annoying backtracking sometimes, and it makes replaying certain parts of levels beyond boring. 

But...and here's where it's going to get a little difficult to explain-- the flaws don't necessarily matter. They're there, sure, but this isn't the kind of game where you play for six hours to get through the levels and acquire more, more, more. This is the kind of game where you spend your time on a level now and then when you need to unwind. It's casual at its most casual-- no breakneck pace, no white-knuckling, just a pleasant time rolling a marble around.

In the end, that's what matters. It's a game you can relax with. It's a game you can unwind with. It's a game that's comfortable. It's relaxing. Marble Mountain may not be perfect, but it serves all your needs that way, and because of that, the flaws kind of take a backseat to how much fun you can have just rolling from level to level. It's satisfying, and in the end, that matters much more than the flaws do. 

Score 3 out of 5

The Reviewer Received a copy of this game for review

Cross of the Dutchman Review

Maybe I'm just spoiled. Maybe that's it. I've been going over and over in my head exactly what it is about Cross of the Dutchman that makes it so unsatisfying to play. It's not a bad game. It's definitely not like Chariot Wars or The Weaponographist, where I was able to pinpoint (violently) what I disliked about it. I don't dislike anything about Cross of the Dutchman, it's a perfectly okay small game about a folk hero and his attempt to drive the Saxons from his homelands. Violently. With his fists. The art style is pretty terrific, the controls aren't too bad, and it's a nice little hack-and-slasher. 

But the game just falls a little short. Maybe not in what it is...it's a hack-and-slash actioner and that's really all I expected from it after a few minutes of play. But definitely in what it could be.  I just felt like after playing it, I hadn't experienced anything that I would really take time out of my day otherwise to do. And I suppose that's the real issue.

Cross of the Dutchman retells the story of Big Pier, or Pier Gerlofs Donia. A big man, fed up with what the occupying Saxons were doing to his people and his lands, Pier Donia decided to take the fight to them. First by beating the everloving crap out of every Saxon he could find, and then by rounding up a band of vigilantes and making targeted strikes on the Saxon forces, stealing supplies, and the like. The player takes the role of Pier, who starts out just trying to get through his day in the village. At first, the player only has a pair of fists and some basic moves, but as the story progresses, they gain companions, a sword, and even a plow at one point as they drive the hordes of vile Saxons from their land. The game alternates between regular hack-and-slash gameplay and stealth sections as you sneak around Saxons during night raids and hold your own against onslaught after onslaught of enemies. 

But here's where it breaks down a little. There's not much to do other than that. There's also not much in the way of tactics or anything other than "Run around, avoid getting hit, power up attack, release attack, repeat." The stealth sections contain moments where, if you go too far off the rails, the game penalizes you by having you caught by people who don't even appear onscreen. In fact, the game as a whole is pretty railsy, which is normally all right (not every game has to be an open-world extravaganza), but chafes when one of the things the game has you do is explore the wide-open levels looking for treasure chests, shortcuts, and alternate routes. 

Captured! By the forces of absolutely no one!

What you can do within those rules isn't really all that great, either. Pacing and progress in the game are slow. It makes sense for the narrative to have Pier not immediately get a sword and go to town on everyone, but spending that much time using his fists before getting the option of a sword just doesn't make that much sense game design-wise. The longer you keep players from progress, the more the players get frustrated with the game. In telling the story of how the legend becomes who he is, the fundamental satisfaction of being the legend is actually lost. Also, the aforementioned rails kind of left me feeling confined. 

All of this is a shame, because the game has some great points, too. The cutscenes are all illustrations, as if they came out of a rather cartoony stained glass window or illuminated manuscript, what voice acting there is isn't terrible, and the two-second sequence where I got to mow down people with a plow was good.

But for every decent sequence, there are six or seven problems with it. Combat doesn't flow, even with the sword. Sometimes you'll be able to hold down the mouse button and cleave through your enemies, sometimes you'll be unable to do anything of the kind, and Pier will stand there and get beat on. Most of the basic moves in combat are irrelevant anyway, as you will find yourself relying more and more on the obscene and unbalanced one-hit kill move that, conveniently enough, also works as an AOE and recharges with relative quickness. This turns the battles into a pattern of running around the map to recharge the super, taking out a cloud of Saxons, and then running around the map to recharge again. 

The tutorial sequences delving into parody doesn't exactly help either. It worked in Fairy Fencer F because it was just that kind of game. But Cross of the Dutchman is very much not that kind of game, and so when Pier's wife constantly talks about minimaps and the like, it just rings hollow.

In the end, I wouldn't recommend Cross of the Dutchman. It's not a great game, and what is there isn't enough to keep me interested. If I hadn't gotten this review copy, I wouldn't be giving it a second look, and I'm not sure anyone should.

2/5

Full disclosure: Reviewer received a free review copy of this game on Steam​