Dead Cells is available in early access on PC via Steam since May 10, 2017. This roguelike offers you an adventure in which you must explore a castle and resist hordes of zombies and monsters. Progress through multiple platforms and battle your enemies with your different weapons and magic. "Dying" and "Repeat" are two words not to be taken lightly in order to succeed in this hardcore game.
The Game
In Dead Cells, you play a dead character, a kind of green viscous matter enters an inanimate body and it revives, it will be the principal protagonist, mysterious and anonymous. The goal is to go as far as possible in the levels by juggling between the phases of platforms, the fighting, the search for treasures. If you die, you start again from the beginning but like Rogue Legacy, you gain weapons and other bonuses that you can reuse on your next run.
The Gameplay
The gameplay is rather simple, you have the right to double jump and dash down, a side roll that allows you to dodge number of attack and enemy spells, you can attack with your primary weapon and your secondary weapon, found in chests and corpse of some enemies. You can equip two weapons with AOE domage like icing bomb, ivy bomb, incendiary bomb, automatic turret, chopper. The choice is numerous and very powerful synergies in terms of combo are present, the ivy bomb for example keeps the enemies for 4 seconds in the same place while the chopper on the ground makes huge domages on static enemies.
You will find weapon blueprint throughout levels, bow, long swords, bloody swords, mass, flamethrower. There are for all tastes and game styles, these patterns can be unlocked with the orbs you accumulate by killing enemies, however, if you die before the end of a level you will inevitably lose all the orbs you Have on you definitively. Unlike Dark souls, levels are generated procedurally (random) so you do not have the ability to return to your corpse to retrieve the lost orbs. A four-potion wallet is to be unlocked as you run through the orbs you collect, you can also choose to invest in something other than the possibility of recovering some of the lost gold by dying, which will be used to buy weapons during your runs unlike the orbs that spend between levels.
level-design are pretty well done, you can teleport from one place to another to quickly access an unexplored area or do this Called "speed runs", some doors can only open if you arrive before a certain time, after the door is permanently blocked. "Runes" are to be discovered by killing elite monsters, which correspond to evolved monster you meet with the tag elite, using zombies that come out of the ground and teleporting beside you if you try to escape, The damage they cause is obviously much more powerful. These runes will allow you to reach places previously inaccessible and even discover whole levels, which clearly drives the player to explore again and again and die again and again, just as Dark Souls death is an integral part of the mechanics.
The artistic direction of the game is beautiful, the pixel art works wonderfully and the levels are very detailed. An unhealthy and dark atmosphere emerge from prison levels, especially with hangers and chains, one can easily guess that it was a place of torture, the sewers are not left behind with all sorts of monsters more vicious some than the others. The soundtrack that come with the DA is very good too, small but dynamic sound, it will rhythm your epic plays in the underground of these fatal levels.
Only two bosses are accessible in this early-access (more will come soon) but believe me you will have to do well before you get through it, especially the second quite arduous, that being said some" elite "monsters are sometimes stronger and more Hard to beat than bosses so think twice before attacking them, with at least one or two potions in your wallet to get your life back if it goes wrong and it will happen.
Last Words
Dead Cells is a really good game that will stand in your mind, the different inspirations make it a very good rogue-like with big challenge . Naturally, this game is addressed to the players who enjoy games like Dark-souls where you die a lot and where the high difficulty is notorious. the lifetime is therefore not quantifiable, it will depend on the time you want to put there, your motivation and perseverance (the game took me 10 hours to beat the final boss). For 16.99 € on Steam, this game is clearly THE rogue-like to have if you like those type of games, already very polish for an early-access, the game promise much more for its final version within a few months.
digging the art, a little like a modern Earthworm Jim or something (probably not the same comedy angle though :P)
Well not as funny as Earthworm but really addictive gameplay :p
This game looks so good and it makes so much fun...but it's really hard :D
For an Early Access game it runs very good ^^