Review - Deadlight

It's strange that so much of getting people excited about games these days relies of dangling big, juicy carrots in front of gamers, when really all it boils down to is how good the carrot actually tastes. As we've seen so many times before, a game's hype can end up being its own worst enemy – especially if the pre-release hype and the finished product don't actually tally up. And so it is with Deadlight, the first effort from Tequila Works that undoubtedly shines as the jewel in this year's Summer Of Arcade… or so everyone thought in the build up to its release. Then it came out, everyone sighed and the world just kept on turning.

It's not that Deadlight is outright bad, but rather that it's not the tense, dramatic action platformer we all expected it to be. Suffice to say, those expecting it to fill the void until Shadow Complex 2 finally arrives are going to be disappointed - where many expected Deadlight to be the undead-themed equivalent of Chair's awesome Metroidvania adventure, turns out it's more like the original Prince Of Persia but with zombies instead .



Strip away Deadlight's utterly gorgeous veneer (which, let's be honest, is the biggest thing it has going for it) and you've got what's essentially a side-scrolling platformer split into three distinct acts. The first is easily the best, slowly bringing you up to speed on the game's controls and backstory while also offering a good few nail-biting 'Argh, they're going to get me!' moments that'll have you gripping the controller in fraught terror. With weaponry sparse and the zombies legion – killing those in your way rarely helps, since more come pouring out of the background until you're quickly overwhelmed – escape is your best, and sometimes only, option as you sprint past monsters reaching into the foreground and generally leap, roll and clamber like your life depends on it (which it obviously does). It might not be the sprawling explore-'em-up we'd hope for, but it's a strong start nonetheless.

Sadly, the game can't follow up on its opening. Act II brings the momentum almost to a standstill by replacing the zombies with spike traps and deadly drops, causing the action to falter massively. True, it gets better near the end, but then everything stumbles again when it takes the inevitable 'the living are worse than the dead' turn, introducing men with guns and corpses stocked with seemingly infinite ammo to help turn you into a one-man army. It's the antithesis of what Deadlight purports to be at the beginning and, combined with a closing section that deliberately strips out the previously-generous checkpointing from earlier stages, pretty much spoils an experience that promised so much in the outset.



It also doesn't help that the game suffers massively from Rick Dangerous Syndrome: that eponymous style of gameplay where you run forward, die, run forward again, avoid what killed you before but then die a little bit further on, before repeating ad infinitum. It's particularly bad in the final act with sections requiring split-second timing of jumps and sequences of moves strung together perfectly to avoid death, stripping away yet more of the tension.

The saddest fact is that Deadlight actually has plenty going for it on the surface. If there's been a more stunningly depicted apocalyptic middle America in a videogame, we've yet to see it and while the script is as clunky and badly-acted as your average horror B-movie, the actual story is pretty gripping and as bleak as they come – a good thing, before you ask, especially when the twist reveals itself. But as with the initial point, it's very much a case of style over substance, especially when you realise just how little substance there actually is; the in-game timer gives it away and aside from being able to find every hidden secret in less than a day, it's totally possible to complete the whole game in less than an hour. Trust us, we did it (and were the first in the world to do so, if the leaderboards were to be believed).



Fact is, if Deadlight hadn't been so tantalisingly marketed beforehand with its quick-cut trailers and silhouetted stylings, our expectations wouldn't have been quite so high. But in doing its pre-release work so well, it turns out that Tequila Works ended up selling us something that it couldn't quite deliver: an experience that's okay but not great, peppered with gaming cliches that really should have been consigned to the bin of history long ago. Looks like it's back to waiting for Chair to get off its arse and make Shadow Complex 2 after all…