Polish indie studio Gruby Entertainment is made up of 14 people. 14 passionate gamers have been developing the newly released action title Deadlink for the past two years, and you can’t help but see this project as a kind of contrast to Sony’s upcoming blockbuster Concord. Both games take a tried and tested and popular concept, spice it up with a tried and tested design style, and try to top it off with a dash of originality. Concord has been in development for over three years by over 100 people. Deadlink was developed for two years by 14 brave souls and oozes passion, creativity, and ingenuity, while Firewalk Studios is more like the much-maligned Overwatch knock-off (I only tried the open beta, but still). In a time when games/movies are mostly produced in boardrooms and low financial risks seem to be more important than originality, imagination, passion, and enthusiasm… It’s great to have games like Deadlink.
Gruby has combined Doom Eternal with Ghostrunner, sprinkled in designs from Cyberpunk 2077 and Shogo: Armor Command, and seasoned the whole thing with Hades’ roguelite approach. It’s a fairly traditional roguelite title where it’s all trial, die, learn, and repeat, and the skills you accumulate over the course of your attempts quickly become rewarding.
Set in the distant future, the line between man and machine is blurred, and as a nameless cyborg pilot, you’re tasked with slaughtering dozens of monstrous robots in sci-fi cyberpunk environments. Shooting or killing approaching enemies will upgrade your “avatar,” and if it gets broken, it’s a breeze, because as the pilot, you’re safe in a VR cage and all you have to do is hop into a freshly made robot to keep firing bullets. The challenge is to get as far as possible without damaging your body, because like all roguelites, every time your cyborg gets broken, you have to start from scratch.
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The story in Deadlink isn’t something I’d like to praise. The narrative isn’t anything to brag about either, as both installments are very typical of the subgenre itself, told through relatively uninspired dialogue boxes that are mostly lifted from a mobile game. However, there are some likeable voice actors and some humor that I appreciate, but the story isn’t what makes Deadlink worth playing. Instead, it’s the gameplay mechanics that draw me in and keep me playing. There are four character classes, plenty of upgrades, and the combat is just as varied depending on your chosen class, playstyle, and upgrades selected.
The combat is very reminiscent of Doom Eternal with some echoes of Overwatch. The shooting is super tight, the game controls are impeccable and like in Doom Eternal I’m intrigued by the possibilities that open up for the experienced player, even if they don’t fully master all the features, to be able to fly through the environments and sow a form destruction that is proven to be possible. Like in Halo, each body can only carry two weapons at a time, which means it’s better to choose two weapons that complement each other and then switch between them depending on the distance and enemy type, and sometimes you get close enough to land the famous left hook.
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Deadlink is very, very fast-paced and requires you to try different combinations of weapons, attacks and approaches (depending on enemy type) to make your way through hostile streets. Much like Eternal and Ghostrunner, there’s a nice precision built into the gameplay that’s well worth it, as the weapons are fun to use and the movement patterns are satisfying. The graphics are beautiful too. Gruby’s cyberpunk future is cartoonish and full of characters. The design looks like a mix of Shogo and System Shock with little details borrowed from Overwatch as well as Metroid and Halo. The mix… is brilliant.
I like bosses, even if they sometimes have too many powers. There is only one strategy that applies to all the bosses I have encountered, which is to push hard and mercilessly from the start, which I like, but I would have liked a bit more variety. There should have been one or two bosses that required me as the player to be a bit strategic and defensive to defeat them, which I think would have added more variety overall. However, this is a minor criticism of an indie game that, in short, offers brilliant FPS action full of character and passion.
