With its early access stabilisers removed, Deadly Days has been unleashed onto the Nintendo Switch, offering another rogue-lite experience to the platform. Despite being a saturated genre, Pixelsplit have opted for a cute zombie-infested world for you to die repeatedly in, hoping to capture the attention of genre fans.
Burger Town
Before a charming tutorial that introduces you to the gameplay, you are given a small cutscene to set up the story. Unfortunately, it seems that the burgers in this fictional town contain a secret ingredient that turns its residents into the undead. Sending out survivors to given sections of the city, you must destroy and loot all the burger shops around to eventually uncover the map to the original burger factory.
Whilst trying to find the root to all this adorable evil, you will be looting, shooting and rescuing; hoping for shiny new loot, or effective new survivors to get you further and further through your run.
The Spice of Life
When you start a run, you get to choose out of three specialisations. All three contain ranks, which will unlock the player specific things to stumble upon during your time with your runs. For example, there is a weapon-based specialisation that allows you to unlock new weapons or power ups that are mostly offensive based and geared towards you clearing hordes of zombies; as well as there being a research based specialisation which acts more as a support choice, giving your leader and allies bonuses.
Along with a whole plethora of items, weapons and ways to base your playstyle, Deadly Days also offers a decent amount of character roles for each randomly generated survivor you come across, which are delightfully written according to the game’s style and also offer a myriad of cleverly constructed in game effects.
The incredible variety on offer here is only possible thanks to the more casual approach that Deadly Days has entwined throughout its narrative, allowing the developers to treat this as a game first and pour most of their creative energy into making hundreds of bizarre and fun things to come across.
All Your Base
After each foray into the dangerous streets you must return to base and manage your growing party of survivors. Each survivor requires one apple per day, which soon becomes a very valuable resource that you constantly keep an eye out for, especially as your band of characters grow throughout the days.
Apples aren’t the only valuable resource in this apocalypse, with scrap and tools being a part of things too. These resources allow you to buy more power up slots, repair weapons or create new facilities that help you bolster your party even more so.
This base is an interesting way to dissect the rogue-lite experience, by segmenting the gameplay sections and giving you some breathing time in between to assess your current run and the items you have stumbled upon. It also allows you to get a bit more intimate with not only your survivors, but also the many different power ups and items you will find each run, making them more exciting to find and play around with.
The Last Hurdle
Deadly Days has had a huge amount of creative effort poured into its style and general vibe, which feels expertly consistent with no breaks in continuity or signs of any inexperience. Unfortunately, all of this is quickly forgotten every time you go out on a mission and play the game.
The general exploration is done by moving a cursor with the analog stick and clicking to move your survivors to loot something. That is basically all you do throughout the game, making it quickly grow stale and at some points it even feels like an idle game, where you just leave the survivors to it.
Worst of all is this game clearly works best with a mouse, with the Switch’s control scheme making a meal out of pointing and clicking. Survivors shoot automatically and there really is not a lot you can do to help your survivors should they get surrounded, aside from activate a power up or click away from the danger.
Even then, you need to rely on the AI of your survivors to deal with any zombies around, which can be hit and miss. Not something you want when death means start over. Such a variety of weapons and character roles completely falls flat from a gameplay perspective, due to the mostly idle nature of the game. Luck plays a massive factor in surviving, rendering all these great things to find, completely pointless.
With rogue-lites, it’s important that the gameplay makes the player feel as if they have control over the outcome. Whilst death is a huge part of these games, the addictiveness of the genre’s stronger entries comes from learning and mastering each element of the gameplay and level design.
It Was Going So Well
It’s difficult to be too negative about Deadly Days as it really is chock full of new things to find and equip. The game also has a well-realised style that has a lot of character to offer to its players.
However its gameplay grows old so quickly so Deadly Days is difficult to recommend. Its lack of longevity basically nullifies any positive parts of the game. For a genre that relies so heavily on engaging moment-to-moment gameplay, Deadly Days fails where it’s most important not to.
