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

20XX Review

There's been a trend recently for "difficult" games, and I hope we see the end of it soon. For all the reputation Dark Souls has, it's not actually difficult so much as it is a game that rewards learning and incentivizes a certain method of play. But because gamers apparently want "bragging rights," or to know that they've defeated something with a certain degree of challenge,  some developers and designers tend to front-load their games with a bunch of content designed to stack the deck against the player and make the game that much more difficult to get through. The peak of this is of course Darkest Dungeon, but other games have definitely been stepping it up.

Which leads us to 20XX. The new Mega Man-themed roguelike platformer from Batterystaple games combines two genres known mainly for their difficulty: old-school platform games, and roguelikes. The issue with this combination is that old-school platformers trade on repetition, muscle memory, and pattern recognition to move their players through the game, and roguelikes usually throw most of this out the window, meaning the players have to learn more to rely on skills and powerups than figuring out level layout. 

In theory, it's an excellent idea, marrying the difficulty and skill-honing of roguelikes with the quick-reaction ethos that drives older platformer games. In practice, however, it's a nightmare. 

An average round of 20XX goes like this: You leave your home base to a procedurally generated level (it's either Vaculab, the jungle level, or Agnisort, the lava/factory stage.) You fight your way through the enemies and hazards to the boss, and on defeating the boss, gain their power as a weapon for later stages. You then re-up, get some upgrades, and continue on to the next stage from there. Or you die, forfeit everything except the upgrade points (known as "soul chips) that you collected up to that point, and are dropped back to the base to upgrade and try again. 

This is kind of frustrating. While the upgrades offer some grading to the overall difficulty cliff, the game can get repetitive quickly. Further compounding things, the way the level structure, or as they call it "the network" changes every time but seems to spit out the same or similar boss combinations each time also gets a little repetitive and frustrating. I'd like it to show me more, but it doesn't really show me enough. And while the variety of upgrades (both passive and active) make up for it a little, it still falls short. 

Which is a shame, because, and I will say this, unless you're getting some kind of nostalgia fix via emulator, this is the best Mega Man game you will play all year. The controls are smooth, the enemy placement makes sense in spite of the procedural generation, and learning the patterns and movements is actually a fairly painless process. This is a good game. It's also a significantly more fair game than a lot of the "difficult" games that wind up making it into general prominence. 

Before I go any further, however, I should say this: The game is in Early Access, so I have no idea what it'll be like when it finally makes it to shelves. Hopefully, the challenge is lowered a little, and the game is tweaked a little more so the process doesn't seem so Sisyphean as it does now. Once the game opens up a little after that first level, it really starts to shine, but before that, it can just be kind of a slog. 

In the end, though, if you're craving decent Mega Man action or a new roguelike to add to the shelf, you can't really go wrong with 20XX. It's one of the rare games where what you see is exactly what you get, and there's nothing wrong with that, I just see it as something that could be a little better. 

3/5

The reviewer received an early-access copy of this game in exchange for an honest review

Overfall Early Access Review

              Overfall is a game with a lot of good things going for it. There is the distinct art style, an excellent modular story engine, some interesting tactical combat, and a very dynamic setting. It's a game that promises a staggering amount of depth, especially when one gets into it. It's a big, expansive game with a big expansive map and big expansive ideas. 

                Unfortunately, this is where things fall a little flat. For a big, expansive game world with an easy to use storyline editor and a lot of cool stuff going for it, the game doesn't exactly deliver on the bountiful promises that it set out to make. It's that failure to deliver that makes everything that much more difficult. What should be an awesome game is only an okay one. 

And this is the issue with Overfall.  But as always, more below. 

                 Overfall is a tactical roleplaying game with procedurally generated elements. In it, you guide a team of adventurers around a series of islands, stopping off at each one for a different story fragment or adventure. The object is to build enough of a reputation to find the lost king who can reunite the world against a group of terrifying barbarian invaders streaming out through a portal. Your heroes solve various problems through a mixture of diplomacy and turn-based hex-based tactical combat, gaining reputation points that slowly build a rapport with various races. This in turn means the races are more likely to help you against the barbarians, and so on and so forth. 

                  Time is also kept by way of a clock in the corner of the screen, as the invaders set up bases and begin to siege the various islands throughout the vast archipelago. The game becomes more difficult as you go, with new challenges and different ships. Overfall makes an effort to make sure the player feels like there's a world, with various factions, ships, fights, and various other factors. You can actually watch wars going on as you sail from village to village and the Vorn become a bigger threat, and that's really cool. 

                When you die (and your characters will die), the game plops you back at the portal with more options unlocked: different party members, new trinkets, various abilities, and other things like that. Thus, the game becomes easier and also gains depth as you go on, with new abilities unlocking and old ones shifting, as the player goes along. The player also gains new classes and characters to unlock as the game goes along, and as your ship becomes more renowned, you can hire new characters for your party to make battles a little easier. You also unlock new weapons, relics, and a ton of other things.

                  Unfortunately, while there is a lot of depth and the game is fun enough, it's very slow. All your unlocks are tied to in-game progress, which is based on the quests you get. As the quests are completely random, it's difficult to make much headway in the plot. You can get completely screwed over just as easily as you can run through a series of all-important reputation missions that allow you access to a faction's homeland. One run may see you getting inconsequential quest after inconsequential quest, others may see you racking up rewards faster than you can spit, and that luck kind of causes the game to bounce off it's players. 

                 Which is a shame, because if you can set up a rhythm, the game is really good. When it's firing on all cylinders and lets you see its depth, it's something amazing. As a shallow time-killer, it can also be pretty cool. But when all you're doing is finding the quests that mean you get minimal rewards and there's no sense of progression, it's really annoying. The game becomes an exercise in gambling and tedium, neither of which really make for a good roleplaying game, as anyone who's played Chinese MMOs can tell you. 

                 And then there's the story editor. The crown jewel of Overfall's engine, the story editor is a crown jewel in the game. A Twine-like interface, it allows you to craft your own miniature narrative and add it to the possible random generation in the game. Furthermore, it allows you to download community adventures, play them, and rate them as you see fit. It's the kind of democratized storytelling that more games should have. It's simple to use, has a lot of applications, and can be used to tell any number of awesome mini-stories. 

                 But between the luck-based content, the tactical battle system that takes a lot to get used to (seriously, some kind of manual would be a godsend), and the just weird nature of the game, Overfall just seems like kind of a mess. In the end, I'd wait for a sale or see how much it's going to be before going out and buying it. It's a good game, but it lacks the vital spark needed to make it a truly amazing one, and I can't fully recommend it based on that.

Final score: 3/5

Full disclosure: The reviewer received a pre-release early access copy for review.

Sublevel Zero Review

There's a very easy test to see if you'd like Sublevel Zero, the new PC game from Sigtrap Games. I'll even link it here. Go on. I'll wait. All right, did you like what you saw there? Then congratulations, this is the game for you.

Joking aside, Sublevel Zero is actually a pretty good game. It's not something I would gladly rush out and buy, but is a good solid game with a decent control scheme and enough depth to be worth the replay value. It also has an aggressive dislike of people who get motion-sick, but then again, considering it's a game with about three hundred sixty degrees of movement range and expects you to dogfight, then you kind of know what you're getting into.

The plot is pretty bare, and advanced through that time-honored plot device: Text logs left around for you to find (as a side note, remember when this was actually used as a narrative device instead of something people could do to just fling around the bare bones of exposition?). Humans have spread all over the galaxy, and have become so tribalized and separated that they have formed "clans" around "warlords" and finding ancient technology. You're a pilot from one of these clans, having found an odd station filled with automated defenses that seems to be responsible for warping the space around it. You head inside, hoping to figure out what's going on, and thus the game begins.

The rest of the game is fairly simple. Fly around neon hallways shooting enemies for parts and currency, find big thing, shoot big thing, collect macguffin, move on to next level for a more difficult course. Sublevel Zero is of course a roguelike (because procedural generation is really buzzy right now), and so each time you die, it will generate a new maze for you to explore at your leisure. It's actually kind of meditative at times, flying through tunnels and performing aerial maneuvers while a soundtrack reminiscient of Artificial Intelligence is pumped through your speakers. 

And then, of course, you hit a dogfight with a bunch of hyper-aggressive turrets and suddenly the game turns into the most dissonant example of a kinetic bullet ballet I've ever seen, with the soundtrack pumping music with a definite chill-out bent while the scores of enemy robots and automated turrets do their level best to make you careen around rooms. With the game's pace, this doesn't seem as jarring as other games with similar themes, but it's still odd to have this ambient world around you and at the same time an absolute blastout with a series of malevolent bots. 

But beyond that, it's surprisingly deep. Bots will explode after they've taken enough damage, so if you cluster another one nearby, they can get hit with the splash effect. In later levels, you can even shoot other surfaces (lava, for one example) to cause splash effects and damage some bots. There's also a wide variety of weapons one can pick up with varying stats, that can then be combined into even more powerful forms to further murder the hell out of the robots in your path (the house recommends anything that calls itself 'room-clearing'.) There are also other ships you can unlock, more powerful hulls, and a variety of goodies to find. 

The one issue I have with the game is that it sits on this depressing trend that, for the purposes of things, I will call "Ernest Cline Syndrome." Ernest Cline Syndrome is what happens when things are retro for not much of a purpose other than being kinda quirky and retro. So. All the precursor logs you find in the game are represented by old-school game boys. There's not really any reason for this, and it kind of took me out of what was actually kind of a cool experience. It also has an issue where it'll build the levels out of pre-set parts, which can be a little annoying at times, with sudden dead ends.

But in the end, a little bit of meh flavor shouldn't scare anyone off. It's a lot of fun, and it's good to start up if you just want to swirl around the inside of the station for a little while. Definitely give this one a go sometime. 

Score a 4 out of 5 

Thanks to the publisher for providing a copy for review.

The Weaponographist Review

When I sat down to write this review, I found myself at a loss. With a game that fails this way on so many levels, what could one possibly address first?

It's pretty clear the game isn't good. There's not really a unifying theme, a lot of the mechanics are better implemented in other games, the weapons boil down to "mash attack as hard as you can," there's no real way to pick a loadout other than blind luck, and the near-constant waves of enemies are actually numbing at a certain point. I found my sensory input dissolving into generic music and bright colors as my fingers tapped the attack keys for reasons I could no longer understand. 

But, even with all of that, it's hard to pinpoint somewhere to start. Somewhere to point out where in the horrifying and sad mesh of monstrous machinery things begin to go wrong. 

But if it wasn't clear from the paragraphs above, I'd give The Weaponographist a wide berth. Despite the occasional good joke, there's really nothing to recommend the game when there is a glut of roguelikes that do it better and with more style than this one.
 

The game at its most distinctive

The Weaponographist stars Doug, a jerk of an adventurer who refuses to help the town of Hellside, and so is cursed to have all his weapons and gear disintegrate after repeated use. To save the town and weaken the curse, he must journey repeatedly into a dungeon full of strange monsters, clearing out each level with a variety of weapons he finds on the bodies of his foes, and the occasional chests that gallop across the screen. While death sends him back to the town above, Doug can weaken the curse and strengthen his abilities by giving the various denizens of the town "demon goo" in exchange for upgraded weapons, abilities, and chests. 

The game is a top-down arena shooter with elements of a roguelike. You charge into the dungeon, lay waste to as many monsters as you can with the weapons you can pick up, die, and then are resurrected in town to spend goop on upgrades and do it all over again. At the end of each "depth" of the dungeon, there's a big boss fight against a large enemy and a bunch of smaller ones, and then it's on to the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's a formula many games use, and when you play a roguelike, it's half luck and half learning the systems through trial and error, then applying what you know to future delves into the dungeon.

But the game doesn't seem to be able to make up its mind. It gives you procedurally generated rooms, but limits them to the same three basic types per area, with little variation. It fills the dungeon up with monsters, but the enemy designs are kind of plain and have no real ties to any overall theme. The weapon degradation mechanic is interesting, but since not all enemies drop weapons, it's possible to face down an entire room of people armed only with the fists that serve as an ineffective default weapon. It feels like a lot of thought went into the idea of these systems, but not very much into the implementation of them.

Get used to this screen. You'll see a lot of it.

This is a problem that extends to the art, too. While the drawn art is well done with distinctive styles and ideas, from a top-down perspective, it looks like you're fighting clipart. Between the generic dungeon design and the painfully generic designs of ninjas and tommy gun-toting mobsters, The Weaponographist's visual style is best described as "boring cartoon fantasy". In fact...actually, I have the perfect way to describe this.

One of the better rooms, but still not great.

It looks like a lazy online game. It plays like a lazy online game. In fact, if this had shown up in some form or another on Kongregate or Newgrounds, I would have killed an hour or so playing it, then promptly forgotten about it entirely. It's not a particularly good arena shooter, as waves of the same four or five enemies careen around an empty room until you kill them all and a door opens to do it all over again and hope you're closer to the boss. It's not a particularly good roguelike, in that there's no strategy or skill or discovery. There's just persistent wave after wave of shooting. It gets frustrating after a while, because no matter how long you play, there's no appreciable difference in the gameplay. 

In case you're wondering, this is from Depth 2. Look how similar it is to Depth 1

To compare and contrast, I loaded up The Binding of Isaac recently. Isaac, a shooter/roguelike hybrid released in 2011, plays in some respects similar to Weaponographist: It's a dual-stick shooter with RPG elements where you go from dungeon to dungeon fighting monsters and bosses with a variety of weapons. But the difference is that Isaac is actually a lot of fun to play, combining a bizarre atmosphere with a vast weapon variety, distinct artwork, some interesting strategic quirks in gameplay, and haunting, discomforting music. Isaac feels like you're going somewhere even when you lose. The Weaponographist feels like you're going nowhere, and then slightly further into nowhere when you win.

In the end, I'd say I don't recommend The Weaponographist very much. The Binding of Isaac is currently on Steam for a little cheaper. If you want a better roguelike or a better arena shooter, both are in ample supply. I suggest playing any of those, and leaving this one alone. 

Score: 1 out of 5

Full Disclosure: The reviewer received a review copy of this game

Crypt of the NecroDancer Review

There are rare times in art when everything works exactly the way it's supposed to. Where everything clicks so perfectly into place that it's almost elegant the way everything is so finely-tuned. And that's what playing Crypt of the NecroDancer  from Brace Yourself Games feels like. Elegant. Refined. Like a well-oiled machine. In its unpolished state it was fun and interesting but heavily flawed, but now that it has reached its final polish, it is a beautiful thing to behold. 

The story isn't anything much to go by. It begins with a young woman named Cadence following her missing father's notes, where she unearths the crypt of a malevolent lich known as the Necro-dancer. Cadence must journey through the crypt, collecting an arsenal of weapons, armor, and items as she delves into level after level in search of the secrets the crypt holds. It lays out the path for a standard dungeon crawler, but there's a little extra wrinkle that builds in nicely.

When Cadence first encounters the Necro-dancer in the game's opening animation, he pulls her heart from her body and infuses it with magic, forcing her to follow a specific beat. As Cadence journeys, all of her movements and actions must be on an exact beat as well, otherwise she simply won't move. 

And that's the premise. A dungeon crawler where absolutely everything has to move to a specific beat. Everything syncs up with this premise. The enemies and even the people in the upgrades screen move to a specific beat. When you find a shop in the dungeons, the shopkeeper actually sings along with the background music. Do well enough, and the ground beneath your character lights up like a disco floor and strobes to the beat. The background music isn't just another part of the ambiance, it's integral to the game. I once made the mistake of loading the game up while listening to music in the background, and I failed utterly, because you need to be listening to the cues. It's not all periodic button presses.

Another wonderful feature of NecroDancer is that, unlike most roguelikes and dungeon crawlers, it doesn't just pit you against increasingly stronger enemies by butting your head against them over and over again. Each zone has a unique set of enemies (hey Weaponographist, you taking notes?) that move in specific ways. While it takes some getting used to, with a bit of planning and some pattern recognition, it's possible (and this is rare outside maybe Binding of Isaac and a few others) for someone to get through the entire dungeon without getting hit once. Incredibly difficult, and takes more luck than skill, but it's possible.

That's something I enjoy that I've been seeing more of in Rogue-likes these days: strategy. There's actually a lot of this in Crypt of the NecroDancer, because the range of movement given allows for a larger playing field. For instance, instead of travelling down a hallway normally and having to take damage from enemies, why not let them get a little closer to you by digging into the side of the hallway, then surprising them? Or, if you know a boss is going to chew you up up close, set a bomb and dance away from them, allowing the bomb to go off in a specific area. Combined with destructible terrain, this causes bosses to sometimes bust through the walls of the dungeon to attack, turning the stage into a desperate race for resources, all to a pounding techno beat. 

Additional characters such as Bard (doesn't have to move to the beat, making the game move at ludicrous speed) and Eli (no weapon, upgraded shovel, and infinite bombs) significantly change the game's topography, causing players to find new solutions and tailor things towards their play style. The game can further be changed by trading rare items for unlocks in the dungeons, unlocking upgrades. 

Normally, this would be where I put some of the things they didn't like. While I did have issues with the way the dragon bosses moved and attacked, making them incredibly difficult with anything but the small supply of ranged weapons, I can't really think of much I'd change in the game or improve. It's a classic all on its own. 

Play this game. It's a game that deserves to stand the test of time. If nothing else because it's executed so flawlessly.

Score: 5/5

Full Disclosure: The reviewer received a steam code to review the game