Death's Gambit: Afterlife

It's good, but it could be much, much better

Controls are ridiculos mess. Awfull and clunky crap. Avoid at all cost

The core loop is fun and engaging, combat is serviceable, but Death's Gambit tries its best to take you away from the meat of the game for the longest periods of time and in the most unfitting moments. 1/3 of the time I've spent in the game was on listening to bloated and incoherent dialogue and expositions at first, and then skipping it. Death's Door is really stoked on selling its story and characters to you, and will bug you like a stereotypical comedic merchant straight from a Monty Python sketch. This is to its detriment, because constant exposition and taking you away from playing made me stop playing it and uninstalling. The game is basically a soulslike in 2D, which works fine at its basic level. However, the setting and visuals are mediocre at best even on the surface, and pulling the Player into it isn't the best idea. The tone is all over the place, a comedic relief follows a comedic relief all the time, and the bits we're supposed to take seriously fall short and embarrasing. One of the strengths of Dark Souls and its setting/story was that it wasn't invasive and on the nose. You could enjoy it and read into it, but it never stood in the way of the gameplay and didn't require any time from the Player if they didn't want to spend time on it. Death's Door is a complete opposite of that. It's so aggressive in selling itself to you, that it takes you away from respawning and reclaiming your corpse (which is 100% you're focused on after dying in a soulslike and shouldn't be bothered) to a retrospective cutscene that takes a couple of minutes to complete. This is pure obliviousness to the design this kind of game should adhere to. The actual gameplay is fun, really. But it's not worth of the hassle of digging through all the noise that developers want to share with the Player and doesn't enhance the game in any way - quite the contrary.

It's surprising to see such low overall ratings. It's a solid 4 at the very least.

Game is buggy and there are glitches while i play from the first second. My character desappears and the background changes in to colorful blocks... Also i cannot enter the menu while i play with cotroller. Anyone else experiencing same issues?