Deadlink - Early Access Review

The following review is based on an early-access build of the game. The final experience may change from the time this review goes out.

Deadlink
Release Date: Oct. 18, 2022 (Early Access release)
Developer: Gruby Entertainment
Publisher: SuperGG
Platform: PC
MSRP: 19.99

There’s a key to difficulty in games, and it’s often hard to work out. It’s a fine line to walk between frustration and satisfaction, between the relief of pulling off a difficult fight (and the knowledge of actual consequence), and making that difficult fight still easy enough that the player wants to keep fighting, rather than logging off to play something more relaxing. It’s a balance not every game can strike, as seen from the number of people who give up on Fromsoft titles. Deadlink, on the other hand, manages it pretty easily. The fights are difficult and the arena setting can turn into an absolute meatgrinder, but every time you squeak out a win, every time you pull that luck and skill together, you feel like a cybernetic neon god. It’s the best feeling in the world, and I can’t wait to see how they expand upon it from here.

Deadlink’s plot is revealed mostly through its in-game encyclopedia, but here are the broad strokes: You are an agent of the Corporate Security Agency sometime in the far future, tasked with policing various megacorporations. In your capacity as an agent, you are uploaded into a cyborg body via an interface known as a “Deadlink,” ready to dole out justice. But before the Deadlink can be put into wide use, it needs to go through exhaustive simulation. That’s where you come in. Over the course of three campaigns, one for each megacorporation the CSA is supposed to take down, you will shoot, explode, and generally reduce to rubble everything in your path. And maybe, if you’re good enough at the simulation, you can do it for real.

The core loop Deadlink sets up throws you into a first-person arena shooter with roguelite elements. Every run, you upload into the simulation and throw yourself against the armies of the three megacorps, all with their own unique units and theme. In between missions, you talk with the two scientists who serve as your handlers, one of whom offers advice and the other offering insulting but helpful tips about how to take down your enemies on the next run. Each run, you earn experience points and unlock rewards, everything from stat upgrades to new loadouts for your existing shells, descending again and again into the underbelly of the city to do battle once more.

The roguelite elements do a great job of maintaining this loop, too. You’re never too far from a restart point, you can very easily get back into the action once you’ve ended a run, and the upgrades can be genuinely helpful, especially the shield, health, and ammo capacity upgrades. The game also pushes you to use abilities other than just basic shooting, as each (temporary) upgrade you get in the combat sections is tied to a specific action— weapon-switching, one of the two “skill” powers, or breaking the “c-balls” full of ammo around the arena. Using these abilities and your grenades also mark enemies, which causes them to explode into showers of shield recharge energy when killed. You can get into a good rhythm of moving around the arena, taking out opponents with a variety of tools at your disposal, and all of it feels deeply satisfying, like you’re the video-game equivalent of John Wick. Few shooters manage their gunplay/skill interactions this well (looking at you, Doom Eternal), but Deadlink allows you to pick up the basics and settle into a rhythm that works.

The game’s setting is similarly brilliant and allows you to sink into it. Even without the codex, the game has a mood and feel that infiltrates every corner of its world, from the Blade Runner-inspired alleys and sleaze, to the bright colors of your weaponry, to even the threatening-looking robotic skeleton that serves as your player character. As you level up your exoskeleton and weapons, the mods even appear as cosmetics, further driving home the idea that you’re upgrading yourself. It even strikes a nice balance with the graphics, hearkening back to cyberpunk shooters like System Shock (dig the red and blue color palette and the way the game even starts you off in a backalley doctor’s office), Cyberpunk (the thumping, undulating dynamic bass soundtrack that kicks in and grows more intense as the battles do), and an intense feel to the gunplay that fits right alongside the modern “boomer shooter” revival currently taking the FPS-playing world by storm.

But it goes without saying that the game could use a bunch of polish. There’s some definite balance issues between the two loadouts, with the “Soldier” shell favoring up close and personal interactions but being outfitted with an AOE that tends to hit maybe one enemy at best and a clunky shotgun among others, and the “Hunter” allowing for a lot more range of movement, a higher rate of fire, and not really much of a downside. The game presents itself as fast-paced and movement based, so having the beginner loadout be a slower, clunkier one doesn’t make as much sense. Especially because it feels like the Soldier loadout is basically just something to push through so you can get to the Hunter loadout.

The game is also pretty stingy on health, something that’s a definite issue in the later levels when you get swarmed by enemies, leading to a situation where, if you get the wrong set of rooms, you can pretty much die just from being trapped and getting shredded without a clear exit in sight. It could also use a little more indication of progress, as there’s no way to tell how close or far away you are from the boss room, which kind of makes the game feel a bit grindy at times. There were also moments where I clipped into the scenery, clipped into enemies, and clipped through the stage, leaving me looking up at where I was supposed to go through a skybox.

These are all kinks to be expected, however, in an early access title. These shouldn’t by any means deter you from playing one of the most exciting cyberpunk shooters of the 2020s (okay, not a huge category, but this and 2077 do kind of stand out above much blander titles like The Ascent), and one with style, mood, and kinetic action in spades. It’s definitely going to be interesting seeing where Deadlink goes as it continues its early-access journey, and well worth getting in on the ground floor.

The Good:
- Fast, kinetic action with easy skill use and a good rhythm
- Excellent mood, atmosphere, and world design
- Gorgeous graphics
- An adrenaline rush of roguelite FPS action

The Bad:
- In the very early stages of its early access journey, so be prepared for some bugs
- Balance issues in the loadouts

Final Score:

A game with a few flaws, but I haven’t been able to stop playing it for four days straight.

Sunday Gold Review

L-R: Sally, Frank, and Gavin

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Sunday Gold
Release Date: September 13, 2022
Developer: BKOM Studios
Publisher: Team 17
Platforms: PC
MSRP: To Be Determined

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I really, really, really want to like Sunday Gold.

I should. It’s a retro-futuristic adventure/heist game taking place in a dystopian city based on ‘70s London Gangster tropes. The art style is an odd and impressionistic one similar to Disco Elysium, one of my favorite games of all time. And the idea of planning heists and putting together evidence to take down a megacorporation is brilliant, especially with the setting details placing the monolithic Hogan Industries at the center of everything from shady pursuits to violent sports. Even some of the mechanics are interesting, with various minigames used to represent the main characters’ abilities. But looking at those mechanics reveals the underpinnings of Sunday Gold, a game fighting itself and the player every step of the way. And unfortunately, that brings the whole package down, somewhat. So in the interest of honesty, I apologize, but I have to be true to my impressions.

It was supposed to be a simple job. That’s what Gavin said when he came to Frank and Sally, all they had to do was go to Hogan Industries, use his backdoor into the system to download some incriminating data, then blackmail Kenny Hogan (who’s a malevolent jerk anyway) for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Given that Frank owed a bunch of loansharks and Sally was floundering as a veterinarian and medic given her hemophobia, it sounded like a sweetheart deal. But things got complicated real quick. Gavin’s security clearance was outdated, the security teams are on alert, and there’s the matter of the dead chief of security and the bloodstained office that the trio found upon reaching the 19th floor. Soon the three are plunged into a murderous conspiracy surrounding Hogan Industries and its founder Kenny Hogan, desperate to solve things and stay out of the red the only way they can— by heisting and piecing bits of the puzzle together so they have a chance to survive.

Sunday Gold has something of interesting mechanics. The meat of the game is a point-and-click adventure where each of the characters has unique skills— Frank, the criminal lowlife sporting a Teddy Boy-style pompadour, can find objects easily and pick locks; Gavin, the twitchy tech expert, can hack computers and upgrade items; and Sally, the team’s muscle and medic, can basically bend bars, lift grates, and heal people. All of these actions, as well as searching the environment for supplies and key items, cost AP, which you have to refresh at the end of every “turn.” Each turn taken raises the alert, encouraging you to be quick and meaningful with your choices rather than to do the adventure game thing of sifting through the environment. When you do run into enemies, the game shifts into a JRPG-style combat sequence, where your AP is used for your attacks and skills against a variety of toughs and security personnel. The object is to balance things and figure out which risks you can take to complete the story as your AP goes down, tension ratcheting up as the alert level gets higher and you have to get things just right to progress, each step bringing you closer to high alert.

The problem with this is that the words “action economy” and “point and click adventure game” should not ever be on the same continent as each other. Point and click adventure games require the player to go through the environment carefully, find multiple solutions, and work things out as they go. It’s a genre that requires a lot of trial and error and solving puzzles in a sometimes obtuse sequence so that the player can eventually reach the specific answers through lateral and unconventional thinking. An action economy is all about finding the best and most workable solutions in any given situation with limited time and resources, requiring you to sometimes find the best way out of a bad situation. The result of combining these two things is that you spend a lot of time burning AP to find the very specific path through the story that the game wants you to take, while the alert level balloons to massive proportions. Even things like Frank’s ability to scan an environment, something that could undercut the normal pixel-hunting mechanics of adventure games, costs AP each time to use, with the ability’s highlighting feature vanishing almost immediately after.

This is compounded by the game’s use of a “composure” meter, essentially a sanity meter for the characters, which can go down as they encounter horrible things. This is great for getting a sense of the individual characteristics, because each character has their own triggers to manage and things they can process. It even goes as far as having them hallucinate or making certain challenges harder unless you carefully manage their composure, which can be brilliant under the right circumstances. Unfortunately, this also means they lose composure for examining certain things, which, again, runs counter to the point and click adventure segments most of the game is built around. If you can’t examine everything and investigate, it makes it difficult to do what you’re supposed to.

While you can, of course, use items to boost AP and restore composure, and restore AP in combat using the “guard” function, it still just feels like you’re fighting the game every time you perform an action. Which, when combined with the “find the specific actions” approach of adventure game logic, feels more like you’re being punished for, well, playing the game. Altogether, it becomes a frustrating morass where you have to push and push and push, then reload an earlier save and use what you know to keep from getting stuck in a tight spot. The game should definitely be tense, but it shouldn’t feel like you’re fighting it as it rams you over and over again against the mechanics. Eventually, one finds themselves save-scumming like mad so that you waste less time and experience more of the story.

All of this is a shame, because the game itself, that is, the story and art and even the feel of things, is really cool. There’s an excellent sense of discovery when you get something right, or discover the right item interaction, or unlock the way forward. The story and visuals set up a nice dark sense of humor, with the character portraits even changing based on the amount of damage or composure lost, and a lot of in-setting materials that add to the world— posters, birthday announcements, and even random comments do a lot to set up the characters and the unique look of 2070s London in a very satisfying way. Hogan and Hogan Industries come off as impossibly huge jerks even before the story starts kicking in, with things like employee motivation posters with bland slogans, a murderous cyberdog used for professional racing (the titular Sunday Gold) and a bulletin board offering a sick day raffle. There’s even a codex that fills in the blanks on setting information.

The art is similarly fantastic, blending surrealist portraits, motion-comic movement, and vibrant colors together in its own unique style, something familiar but entirely its own. The whole world looks like an indie comic book, and the spy-thriller soundtrack and horn stings underscore that beautifully. Even the character animations are fun, with characters stooping over when hurt, or victory poses that keep consistent with character dynamics and personality. The presentation is awesome, and I love every second I spend in that world.

Similarly, the RPG parts of the game do actually involve a bit of tactical thinking, with skill trees, interactions, and actions like guard refreshing your action economy making it worth thinking about your choices in any given situation, balancing defense and item use with the characters who are lower in AP, giving the usual static character roles a more rotational feel. Sure, Sally is the team medic, but if Frank’s down AP and has painkillers and adrenaline to spare, Sally can be just as good at offense. Sure, Gavin can debuff, but in a pinch, if Frank and Sally aren’t able to deal damage, his output’s similarly on the level. Skill trees also add a little complexity, lowering AP costs and allowing things like Gavin upgrading more items and Frank to get a scan ability to make pixel-hunting a little easier.

But when you’re fighting the mechanics every step of the way, it’s not worth it. In the end, Sunday Gold is a brilliantly flawed game, one that, if you have the patience to deal with its barriers of entry and contradictory mechanics, has some genuine moments of delight built in. I wish, however, the brilliance that shines through, the careful consideration to the world and wealth of interesting moments throughout, wasn’t ultimately obscured by the clouds of its own systems and gameplay.

The Good
- Excellent world design
- Fantastic art and characters
- Brilliant writing and a dark sense of humor
- Unusual but rewarding puzzles

The Bad
- Mechanics that fight the player every step of the way
- Impossibly tight margin of error that makes save-scumming pretty much mandatory
- Adventure game elements and turn-based elements don’t allow each other breathing room
- Very easy to get stuck without any clear idea of where to go next or what to do

Final Score:

I wish it didn’t have to be this, but I have to be honest

Gamedec Review

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Publisher: Anshar Publishing
Developer: Anshar Studios
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: Sept. 16, 2021
Price: $29.99 USD

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Gamedec is frustrating. It’s always difficult to write a review like this, a game I clearly had some fun with, a game I really want to like, but that I also have to criticize. It’s a cyberpunk noir RPG-adventure game with actual investigation and deduction mechanics. The world is so deep you could spend hours lost in the various codexes and character bios alone. The graphics are a little basic in places, but the world has a genuine aesthetic that it’s a lot of fun to look at and wander through. But every time I find myself charmed by its world, I get stuck in the level and forced to load a save. A decision tree might say one thing but possibly mean another.

In short? This could be a really good game, a solid entry in the genre pioneered by Disco Elysium that’s just starting to take off (see also Murder Mystery Machine and to a more failed extent, The Sunken City) but dear God is it in a rough state.

Sometimes, a car is an effective solution

Gamedec drops you into the trenchcoat of the titular gamedec, a kind of private investigator who handles cases in virtual reality MMOs. As you hunt down cheaters, scammers, cultists, and the odd child labor ring, you make enough to get by and hopefully try to make a little light in the dark world of futuristic Warsaw. But as you investigate, slowly another, more sinister thread emerges— one involving a mysterious tree, twin cultists, and possibly even your own memories and thoughts themselves. It will take all your cunning and instinct to get out of this one, especially in a world where everyone’s wearing a false identity.

So first, the good. Gamedec’s investigation system is unrivaled and I wish more games would do something like it. As you solve sidequests and gather clues, you slowly fill up a group of deductions. At any time, you can use the clues you have to make a conclusion and move on to the next phase of the case, as long as you’ve collected enough evidence for it. This can be a godsend if you’ve gotten tired of a certain scene or movement in the game. It also allows something most games don’t, which is the ability to draw the wrong conclusion and possibly send the case in a different direction.

This ties directly into the branching narrative. Choices you make don’t just last within your current investigation, but can have far-reaching consequences down the line, depending on how you interact with others and what clues you can figure out. Each case has a variety of outcomes, and depending on your skills, background, approach to each situation, and how you interpret the clues, you can get a wildly branching story with a number of start and endpoints based on that. In theory, it’s liberating— a huge (if linear) world where all your choices matter and each playthrough can be completely different based on how you work the case.

Aiding in this, there are a number of “professions” related to skills you can pick up, everything from electronic intrusion to programming to even cheating in games. Each one’s related to different methods of responding, so you can level up your skills based on how you play, as you’ll be earning points from that. It’s incredibly adaptive, and while the skill tree might not be as vast as some adventure/RPGs, it’s a lot more expressive in places, with clear, concise descriptions telling you what everything is supposed to do.

The most essential starting skill. Never leave home without it

But here would be where things start to fall apart a little. While it’s clear how things might help, the actual in-game benefits range from “marginally useful” to “can solve entire stages of the case in one section and then do very little the rest of the game.” It’s not clear how helpful a profession can be until you use it, at which point you might be rather deep into a case. Similarly, while the skill points you earn are based on the personality of your gamedec, apart from a few adjectives and a group of bars on the side, it’s unclear exactly how the points you need to earn relate to each approach. Overall, this just makes it feel obtuse and confusing more than anything.

Adding to that obtuse feeling, sometimes puzzling through the plot feels like stumbling blindly. While it’s to be expected that you won’t see or do everything during one playthrough (and Gamedec makes this very clear as you play), the lack of direction, existence of wrong choices, and the idea that some things can be permanently locked off just make it feel obstructive rather than open-ended. Sure, it’s refreshing to have a game that allows you to miss content and doesn’t hand-hold at all, but Gamedec’s lack of signposting feels downright malicious at times. Especially when compared to the game’s own demo, which walked you through an early case without completely solving everything for you. It’s especially annoying when combined with the difficulty, where sometimes making the wrong deduction and getting the wrong people angry with you can feel like the game hits a dead end.

Gamedec could also benefit from a better quest log. While I understand the need for the player to puzzle through everything on their own, the lack of a detailed log apart from the information on the right-hand side of the screen makes it difficult to know what direction you need to travel in at all. Even the slightest bit of info could help, as it’s difficult to tell what “investigate the anomaly” means apart from wandering around and looking at the street, hoping the right hotspot suddenly reveals itself.

Getting stuck in VR Farmville is a special kind of Hell

Which brings us to the bugs. Even with the fixes and patching done to the initial prerelease build, the game’s in rough shape. While I can’t speak to every player’s experience, I personally ended up getting stuck in place in some areas, clicking frantically in an effort to move around the screen. There were also moments where NPCs reacted to dialogue from later in the scene, or simply closed conversations quickly using dialogue from earlier parts. One scene stopped completely dead, making it impossible to continue. In a rather odd gesture, controller support is automatically enabled when the game detects a controller, and no option in the menu exists to turn it off. It’s upsetting that a game with this much promise is this rough, but it’s also a sad reality that sometimes ambitious projects just need a little more love

So should you play Gamedec? Unequivocally, yes. But not right now. Wait a little longer, let the game get a little more polish, and you’ll be rewarded with an unusual and fun adventure/RPG with a wide degree of replayability. But until it sheds that layer of frustration and smooths out some of the rough edges, you’re going to want to be a little more patient.

The Good
- Deep, branching mystery with unusual characters and a twisting plot
- Excellent character interactions and some truly messed-up noir scenes
- Intriguing mechanics for both character creation and investigation
- Deduction mechanic rewards players for finding evidence and replaying scenes
- Immersive cyberpunk world

The Bad
- Obtuse narrative design means it’s difficult to find out where to go next
- Loads of bugs can make getting through the game painful
- Large range of deductions can make getting the essence of the story a little difficult

Final Score:

Final note: This game was procured as a review code in exchange for an honest review. The review is based on a release build as of 9/11/2021. It may not reflect the final build of the game

Cloudpunk Review

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Release date: April 23, 2020

Developer: ION LANDS

Platforms: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows

Price: $19.99

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By all accounts, I should like Cloudpunk. The vast neon-swathed cityscape evokes the best moments of Blade Runner, complete with the murmur of dystopian advertisements in the background. The flight controls are simple and smooth, allowing you to change height and swing through the city with ease, trailing twin neon contrails as you swerve around Asian-inspired buildings and avoid cars. It’s actually kind of relaxing, even at its most tense, sending you through gorgeous neighborhoods and actually letting you get out to explore them, having conversations that serve to deepen the world and helping various people with their problems. And lastly, it’s the kind of everyday-job noir-flavored experience that I’ve always loved, tasking you with doing a relatively low-level job as the plots around you darken further and further, as seen in such games as VA-11 hall-A and Night Call, among others. That’s all really cool.

So what bothers me? Why this feeling that something’s off?

Cloudpunk puts you in the driver’s seat with Rania, a fresh-faced new arrival in a vast multi-tiered megalopolis who has just joined the Cloudpunk courier service. She’s given her own delivery vehicle, an AI assistant she gives the face and personality of her pet dog, and two simple rules: Follow delivery instructions, and never look in the package. The game follows Rania over the course of one night, criscrossing the vast city and cruising from district to district as she delivers packages, helps out lonely postal robots, dodges annoying street harassers, and has to deal with a drunk dispatcher who knows more than she lets on. But something ominous is going on in the city, whether it’s the mysterious ticking packages, the increasingly terse AI running the Cloudpunk service, or the engineers’ fear that the entire city is falling apart. Rania just wants to survive the night, but she might end up doing so much more.

So first, the game has a unique style that works incredibly well for it. It’s got a perpetually raining neon-dystopia aesthetic with pleasantly chunky voxel graphics that looks retro while also keeping a sort of modern edge and makes the best use of its graphics, with buildings seeming to tower off into the distance and buildings full of lights. It’s also smooth enough that you can fly around the large districts and even get out and walk through areas without having to load, save for flying to or from another district. It’s seamless, and in an age where that’s an issue for most triple-A games, that’s impressive. Particularly impressive is that you can fly right up to and even into buildings, as everything in the city is actually there in front of you. It’s really cool, and gives the flight a weight and meaning as you swerve through buildings and around cars.

The soundtrack is also perfect, it’s clear Vangelis’ Blade Runner score was an influence, and it works perfectly over the towering spires of the city and rainy streets. It’s never intrusive, though, instead adding accents to the existing action, ramping up and down as scenes get more or less intense. Usually, I listen to my own music or podcasts after a while instead of game music, and I immediately switched off my audio so that I could listen to the soundtrack. It was that integral to the atmosphere.

The flight is also really easy, just WSAD for direction, and shift/space for ascend/descend. The controls are smooth and don’t really give you a lot of trouble, and work just as easily moving around the pedestrian scenes as much as the city. It’s a very no-fuss kind of movement, with only the annoyance of a fixed camera and its predilection for messing up your transitions from screen to screen to keep from a whole recommendation. Well, that and waiting for elevators. It’s immersive, but sometimes you just don’t want to have to wait for an elevator. I think it’s both a plus and a minus. It’s relaxing and really satisfying zipping around the city and being immersed in the day-to-day of being a package deliverer in this odd futuristic world, meeting eccentric characters, and trying to solve their problems.

But this is a game based on a narrative, and once it gets into that mode, the cracks start to show. The voice acting tends to vary from person to person and even from line reading and line reading, sometimes making the emotion and inflection in scenes feel a little jarring. I finally turned down the voices, because having the text entirely detached from the voices felt wrong somehow, but hearing the stilted conversations between Rania and Camus, her AI dog, got on my nerves. I should say that there are standouts in the voice cast— a lot of the characters you meet are acted wonderfully— but when Rania is really uneven and you have to spend the most time with her, the immersion the rest of the game works so hard on tends to stutter a bit.

Rania is kind of uneven in general, sometimes. She’s not presented as unsympathetic or ignorant in any particular way, and even has numerous encounters with the usual army of male straw-man idiots, from the guy who tries to ask her out randomly to a creep who demands a debate on how women are inferior, to a music-video director who tries to appropriate her look and culture for a pop star he’s working with, that allow the player to sympathize with her. But then whenever she meets certain characters, most notably a human “companion” for a robot and a dominatrix, suddenly she seems to view what they do as exploitative and dehumanizing, lecturing them on their lifestyle and business choices in a way that feels (since they’re doing something completely consensual and not hurting anyone) condescending and wrong. It’s a little problematic, and the sense you get occasionally from Rania that these people and their lives are beneath her. It’s jarring when compared with the character arc that sees her becoming more and more a part of the city as she goes, getting embroiled in the various factions and lives of its inhabitants piece by piece, and really annoying at times.

It’s a small out of place patch in an otherwise perfect cloudy sky, though. The story is suitably dark and noir in all the right places, the smooth flying around the city is incredibly relaxing, and apart from some timed segments, the ability to explore the city at your own pace and even leave the car at some points to explore on foot are all a lot of fun. It’s a fantastic and ambitious game that’s perfect for moody evenings. Put on some low jazz, load it up, and give it a go. Just maybe fiddle with the voice settings a bit first.

The Good:
- Relaxing and deep experience of driving around a futuristic city
- Loads of plot, atmosphere, and an open-ended experience
- Smooth controls and a wide-open map full of collectibles and sidequests to explore

The Bad
- Uneven voice acting can lead to jarring moments
- SWERFery makes the lead character seem kind of unsympathetic
- Lead character can kind of be a jerk
- Occasionally the environments can look a little similar