Deadlight Review (PC, Xbox 360)

It’s Halloween, folks!  In just a few short hours I’ll be taking my son out begging for candy in his ridiculously overpriced costume in the pouring rain.  But for now I’ll be eating my tuna salad sandwich breakfast and white chocolate mocha enjoying a few hours of Halloween goodness before the four-foot creatures of the night start roaming the streets.  And what goes better with tuna sandwiches and coffee than zombies?

The game I’m reviewing today is called Deadlight by Tequila Studios and published by Microsoft Studios, and it’s available on Xbox Live Arcade as well as on Steam.  The whole game centers on Randall Wayne, one of few survivors of a virus that reanimates the dead.  The story is set in Seattle in the summer of 1986.  An odd choice of year, but whatever works, I suppose.  Most game developers these days seem to be aiming for future apocalypse scenarios, so a retelling of history is always nice to see.  I just hope it doesn’t become a mainstream habit.

 

As Randall, you have been separated from your wife, Shannon, and daughter Lydia.  You have formed a group with your friend Ben, a police officer named Sam, and two sisters named Stella and Karla.  Karla is bitten in the intro video and turns into a zombie, referred to as “shadows” in this game, and Randall kills her.  When the other survivors return and confront him about it, the zombies start trying to break into their boarded up room in the warehouse.  Randall tells the others to meet him at the “Safe Point”, and they escape through a vent, leaving Randall in the room to find his own way out.  This is where you take over as Randall.

The gameplay is reminiscent of the old-school 2D scrollers that many of us grew up with, but with much better graphics.  This is called 2.5D, as in two-and-a-half-dimensional.  Check out the dictionary for details on this style of gameplay.  As you make your way from building to building, and room to room, there is highly detailed artwork going on in the background in what looks like a comic book form.  Most of this game takes the form of a graphic novel, really.  The foreground is black, as is the side of Randall that faces the screen.  Everything else is brightly lit, yet dark and gloomy.  The dimensions of the walls on the background, the shadows, the smoke rising from buildings in the distance, it all gives the game a depth that makes it feel like more than just a scroller.

 

The heads up display (HUD) shows that you have a health meter and a life meter.  I’ve found that, just like in I Am Alive, the stamina meter drops quickly as you hang from objects.  It then fills back up quickly once you climb up or drop to the ground.  I hung onto a ledge to see what happens when it runs out.  The screen starts flashing blue around the edges and then you fall.  If you survive, it fills up.  If you die… draw your own conclusions.  The meter also runs down while swinging a weapon, although it doesn’t affect you much.  Your swings just get a little weaker and there is more time between them.

 

While you are pretty much stuck in the defined path set for Randall, the zombies can come from anywhere.  When you escape from the lower confines of the city and get to the rooftops, you see Ben and the rest of your group escaping in what looks like an ambulance.  There are zombies chasing them, and then they stop and just start mulling around on the street below.  Once again, for a game that is played like this one is, the background art is beautiful.  It really looks like some of the lesser-known parts of Seattle.  You know, the places the Space Needle tourists tend to avoid.  As I look at the street below Randall, I can’t help but think that I’ve driven down it.

Once you get down to street level you get your first experience with killing zombies by playing on their stupidity.  There is a downed electrical line on the ground in front of you.  You press Y to taunt the undead, and they come hobbling at you.  Then they get ravaged by electricity and die.  Again.  As I went along, I found that much of the game was like this.  You get zombies underneath heavy objects and push it off on them, or you release levers and squash them into a pulp with heavy boxes or machinery.

From the rooftops we end up underground, in the tunnels that weave underneath all of Seattle.  I took the “Underground Seattle” tour when I first moved here, and I have to say they did a great job of making it look good.  As you go along you come to some areas that are flooded with water.  Since your character can’t swim, you have to drain the areas before you can proceed.  In some places you can see bodies under the water.  What sucks is that even after you drain the water down to a level that Randall can safely wade through it, you still don’t know if they are zombies or just dead people until you get in the water.  And I’m not going to tell you what they are.

 

Once you get out of the tunnels you come out next to Interstate 5.  While underneath parts of I-5 you can see zombies in the foreground and background roaming the interstate.  Wrecked cars litter the street.  At one point, in the foreground, a zombie is trying to escape from a car window as you run past him as well as a pile of human remains covered in flies on the ground.  You get across I-5 and onto the other side of the embankment and that’s where you see a sign for the “Safe Point” and an arrow pointing in the only direction that you’re allowed to travel that’s not back where you came from.

This is as far as I’m going to take you in the game as far as gameplay.  It really is such a fun game that I don’t want to take away from the experience of those who haven’t played it yet.  Just know that it does get harder and more complicated as it goes along.  Just like in most zombie stories, you will encounter a group of malignant survivors.  This group calls themselves the “New Law”, and they are a bunch of assholes, as you will find out first hand.  There are many traps and puzzles to deal with as the game goes along, and you get downright depressed for Randall the more you play.  And the ending is the saddest and most depressing that I’ve experienced in a game.

 

Overall, the gameplay was amazing for a game like this.  I haven’t been a fan of 2D gaming since the Mario games on early Nintendo, but this game sucked me in and wouldn’t let me go.  The storyline was enthralling and the characters felt real.  The dialogue wasn’t the usual “let’s kill these f***ers” that you hear in a lot of other zombie games.  It had emotion, and made you feel like these people could be experiencing something that can only be described as waiting to die.  I loved the game, and I tip my hat to Tequila Works and MS Studios.  This one is a real winner.