An Honest Review

[StOo]

Warning: spoilers below.

Just finished my first (and only) playthrough of Deadlight.

Here's my review:

The gameplay is pretty much 100% oldskool Prince of Persia, with added zombies. That's it. Whether that's good or bad is a matter of preference.

The controls are frustrating and clunky. You'll find yourself wrestling with them, whether you use a gamepad or a keyboard (I tried both, stuck with the gamepad).

The voice acting is really, really bad. I mean, among the worst I've heard. The voice actors clearly had no idea what was supposed to be happening in the game while they were delivering the lines, so their tone almost never matched the action. Hell, it didn't even match the tone of the characters they were supposedly talking to.

The storyline is just cliched, badly-written crap. The ending is hilariously bad. I actually laughed out loud when Randall suddenly remembers that he murdered his wife and daughter, and that's used as justification to shove Stella off the pier into the water instead of hacking her to bits with an axe. In fact, allow me to summarise the ending of the game:

Randall: "STELA PPL ALWAYS HAS CHOICES SO GT IN TH WATER BTCH AND MAYB I SHOULDNT HAV KILL MY FAMILY?!?!?!"

...and while I'm on the subject: when he kills his wife and daughter he only has 2 shells left for his shotgun and the shadows were about to burst through the door... so how did HE escape? This goes completely unexplained, and is just one of many gaping holes in the silly, childish plot.

My advice is to just ignore everything the characters say and skip the cutscenes because they're all absolute nonsense.

Still, occasionally the levels look kinda pretty and the platforming and puzzles can be satisfying when the game isn't ruining them with some ludicrous dialogue or a massive difficulty spike exacerbated by clumsy controls, but - ultimately - this is still just PoP with zombies. There is absolutely nothing original here.

For those of you who don't like reading paragraphs, here's some bullet-point lists!

The Bad

• A terrible, cliched and utterly nonsensical story.
  
• Shockingly bad voice acting. Just.. so, so bad.
  
• Controls that sometimes just seem to ignore you completely.
  
• Combat that just feels frustrating rather than a desperate struggle against the odds.
  
• A difficulty curve that is like you handed a child a crayon and told them to draw a mountain range.
  
• One of the most ridiculous anti-climactic endings in videogame history.

The Good

• Sometimes it looks pretty good, but then doesn't every UE3 game?
  
• When the controls aren't getting in the way, the actual platforming and puzzling can be kinda fun.
  
• It's short.
  
• It's cheap!

And for people who scroll to the end to see a numerical score:

I give this game 270,992,314 out of 541,984,628.