NeverDead Review: A Bloody Mess

Crafty games is hard work. NeverDead is a fantastic model of just how hard it is. The main gameplay hook – your reputation being able to detach his own limbs and roll himself back collectively again – sounds novel on paper (and was tailor-made to sound awe-inspiring in preview coverage). But, if you’re going to use a unique mechanic, you have to design a game around making that concept fun (Portal is a fantastic model). Uprising may have come up with a new thought, but these days that’s simply not enough. By shoehorning this eccentric thought into a terrible, unoriginal third-person action game, it produced an encounter that is too clichéd to feel fresh but also fails at delivering on the basics of the genre.

The plot, which I won’t waste too much time on, is pure drivel. You’re Bryce Boltzmann, an undead worker of a regime agency that is tasked with killing off the innumerable demons that threaten our world. Without spoiling too much (though I guessed the huge plot “twist” after about 15 minutes), a parallel tale told in cutscenes eventually sheds light on Bryce’s origins. Frankly, the prose is so terrible I couldn’t care less about the tale, and Bryce is armed with some of the worst one-liners in recent memory.

With your fellow agent Arcadia, you proceed to the end of this stolid adventure by shooting and hacking owing to endless waves of demonic creatures and increasingly frustrating boss battles. The basic combat is on terrible terms between ordinary third-person shooting and analog sword action. The levels are dull (you commonly have to kill every enemy in an area to open the next door), with the exception of some amusing platforming you do as a spiritual head.

While there’s not anything incorrect with the basic combat design, myriad technological issues mar this encounter to the point where, at times, the onscreen action is incomprehensible. The camera is activist, the targeting suspect, and your body flies apart nearly every time you take noteworthy hurt (forcing you to roll your head back to your body before your head is inhaled by enemies). Now and again, you’ll get caught in a loop of being paid hit, rolling your head back on your body, and being hit and flying apart again.

This is even more trying when the camera wigs out and you can’t tell where you are. The boss battles, which are long, multi-stage wars of attrition, rarely offer anything more creative than “shoot him in the glowing part” and figure such annoying tropes as regenerating health bars. Even worse, a few times I encountered bugs like my cut off head rolling owing to the floor into a weird, blank dimension with only a city skyline and a additional, more serious bug that left me cut off from the last enemy I needed to kill to advance owing to the next door.

This lack of polish wouldn’t be nearly as frustrating if not for the fact that the game’s fundamental figure – the dismemberment of the main characters – makes the game less fun than it would have been as just a plain ancient third-person action game. Sure, it’s a unique thought – but not every thought is worth pursuing. In the case of NeverDead, this concept should have been left on the cold room floor. You could say the same about the game itself.

Tags: Bloody, Mess, NeverDead, Review, shooting bloody mess games, tennormans revenge review