Deadnaut

In many ways, this game is exactly what I'd hoped it would be. The pip-boy interface feels realistic and almost tactile, creating a powerful atmosphere and enabling immersion. The random elements to each mission allow for theoretically infinite variation, and the character customization / gear system is deep enough to feed that RPG itch. Despite these accomplishments, however, I can't recommend this game. There is only one play mode, a four-mission campaign, and no way to customize the experience by, for example, selecting a mission type. Hacking is near-useless on most missions, and not well designed anyway. The ships are fairly generic, consisting of various rectangles randomly jammed together and stuffed full of identical corpses, computers, and the odd lootable schematic. The real kiss of death, however, is that this is a game that never seems to play fair. I understand that it's meant to be hard, but some missions are plain impossible. Maybe you'll be told to kill all enemies, but the randomly generated enemies will be unbelievably strong. Maybe you'll need to find a ships log, but it will happen to be at the end of several damaged corridors which will critically damage your 'Nauts. Even the most simple acts of combat tend to feel unfair, since it can be impossible to tell if your 'Nauts are even firing at the enemies or just standing around as they get mauled to death. Perhaps I'm just bad at this game, so take my words with a grain of salt. But when I bought this game, I was fully aware of the difficulties of roguelikes and I came expecting a challenge. What I got was more frustration than challenge; I've only once gotten to the second mission of a campaign, and then only by blind luck. The atmosphere in this game may be excellent, but try to find a video of some gameplay and determine if it looks manageable for you. If not, you won't have much fun.

This is a pretty unforgiving game. I play it when I want to feel better about how FTL is treating me. It does need a bit of a tutorial. I feel it a bit odd that someone paid to run the console would be so unfamiliar with it. The pop ups that you get (once as far as I can tell) don't help much once they are gone, and the manual is a tome. One thing that bugs me is how once your Deadnauts have died you have to go back to the main menu, you cant review any of the logs and data you might have collected and not read yet. It would also be nice to have a difficulty setting or the ability to carry over your crew and gear to the next mission. Other than that, its a fun game. I like the overall feel of the game and I plan to play it more.

Deadnaut is a real-time rouge-like that strays just far enough from the original mold to feel fresh, modern, and innovative, without losing the charm of what makes rougelikes so fun. The graphics, are superb and it seems to fully show the creative vision of the development team. The game is first person (wait what?), as in you play yourself sitting in an outside vessel cock-pit of sorts relaying orders to the deadnauts on the ground, the result is incredible immersion. You can look round your space to see various statistics, reports, and information that is slowly drip-fed to you as your deadnauts discover more of the ship, but the devs were sure to create feelings of powerlessness at the same time, your signals can be hacked and affected by the watchers (the ship you are searching's firewall), or even more malevolent and sinister forces, of course you can attempt to compensate for the various issues, but there is only so much you can do when your audio signals are buggered and your video feed is also undergoing interference, leaving you iin the dark (at least the data screens arn't affected right?) By only showing a somewhat bare-bones view of what is going on, the descriptions, erratic movements, and conversations cause your mind to fill in the horrific blanks. The deadnauts develop relationships with their colleagues, and various flaws can damage or affect relationships, or even the integrity of the mission. However, this does make for great story telling. The AI is also very well done, being unpredictable, and randomly generated for each playthrough and campaign type, you have to work with the information your deadnauts give to you over how to approach these enemies, and what there strengths and weaknesses are. However, I cannot mention everything, and i must get to the cons: Lack of a tutorial, gonna have to do some reading. Issues for colourblind? Sometimes the game, as with all rougelikes will throw a big fuck you at you ruining the run. Highly recommended

Deadnaut is a failed experiment. It tries something interesting with its aesthetics - its lack of explanation, its information overload - but it just isn't fun. Imagine you're playing a Roguelike. No, scratch that. You're not playing the game yourself. Instead, you are controlling someone who is playing a game - watching them through a grainy surveillance camera, listening through a crappy microphone, and trying to give them instructions on how to beat the game. Is something exciting happening on screen? Maybe. Are the mechanics fun? Quite possibly. Is there an athmosphere of dread? We can infer so. But we don't get to experience any of that, because we don't get to play the game ourselves.