Review dead cells upgrade#

If that’s not great game design, I don’t know what is.

In theory, it’s a pastiche that just shouldn’t work, but in practice it’s a slick and satisfying action RPG with a progression loop that’s going to keep me clicking away into the wee hours of the night, long after the initial honeymoon phase has subsided. It draws from all sorts of genres and still somehow ends up being a uniquely original game. Like I said at the beginning of this review, Dead Cells is a weird game. and even tracks the timer on your current run, to make for some truly efficient speedrunning. The game tracks your stats across all parameters including minute stats, number of times you’ve killed a certain enemy, etc. This means that if you skip past large chunks of the map, you still have a shot at making steady progress if you get to this door quick enough. Every level has a secret door that contains lots of gold and cells but is forever locked if you don’t reach it within a certain time limit. There are also several measures in place for those players who want to get through the game quickly instead of exploring every nook and cranny, and some very specific tools to aid and encourage speedrunners. Abilities like teleporting between statues, running up walls, and sprouting vines to climb up to unreachable areas open up traversal in ways that expands the scope of all subsequent runs (this is where the game’s Metroidvania inspiration shows the strongest). To that end, the progression loop in Dead Cells has you unlocking weapons, tools, and blueprints that add to the RNG pool of gear available for subsequent runs, whereas beating bosses and progressing unlock traversal abilities that stay with you permanently. It’s a great system that always keeps things fresh.ĭying takes you all the way back to the beginning of the game, but Dead Cells is what I like to call a Groundhog Day roguelike where every unsuccessful run still chips away at some sort of progression until you eventually have the tools and knowledge necessary to break the cycle. And since stat upgrades reset at the beginning of every new run, you’re encouraged to keep experimenting and adapting based on playstyles as well as what weapons and tools you pick up on your current run.

Review dead cells upgrade#

Every stat upgrade increases your maximum health, so you’re becoming more resilient regardless of which way you build. While some melee weapons benefit as much from tactics as they do from brutality. Meaning while Brutality will make you better with melee weapons across the board, it might bolster some of your ranged weapons, too. The beauty of Dead Cells, however, is that while your stats are clear cut, most of the weapons and tools you find function on two or more stats. You run through procedurally generated levels, fighting enemies with melee and ranged weapons and tools, gather cells (the equivalent of the Souls from Dark Souls) to power up your character and unlock weapons and abilities to aid you in subsequent runs.ĭuring each run, you level up your character across three stats: Brutality (melee), Tactics (Ranged), and Survival (Tools). Here’s how it works, you’re a sentient ball of goop that has inhabited a dead body to escape a cell on an ever-changing island fortress. So what is Dead Cells? Well, it’s a roguelike metroidvania with RPG-like progression.

The writing is as dry as Dubai weather and the gameplay is so slick, it will make you feel like you’re really good at the game even if you aren’t. Yes, Dead Cells borrows mechanics generously from all over the place, but the final product is something uniquely its own, wrapped around a visual aesthetic and sense of humour that’s quite unlike anything else. Make no mistake, the game does draw heavily from both of the aforementioned titles when it comes to the core gameplay loop and moment-to-moment progression, but the overall structure is more similar to The Binding of Isaac than anything else.Ī lot of times, describing a game by describing mechanics from various other games can make it sound like a lazy rip-off, but mechanical originality is nowhere near as vital to game development as people seem to think. It’s a game that has often been compared to Symphony of the Night and occasionally Dark Souls (honestly, what isn’t compared to Dark Souls these days?), but the closest point of comparison I can find for this roguelike metroidvania is The Binding of Isaac.