Max Payne crossed with Katamari Damacy and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. That’s the pitch. A game where you get to play as an immortal demon hunter who can rip off his own head and roll it through a ventilation shaft to find hidden areas, or whose arms and legs tear off as the player is attacked, leaving you to thrash his dismembered torso around the level in an effort to reattach them.
We were quietly looking forward to NeverDead, a game which, on paper, sounded like a side-splitting spin on an overcrowded genre. So why, then, is it never as good as it should be?
That’ll be Rebellion’s doing, the British developer behind Rogue Warrior and Shellshock 2, and the good-but-not-good-enough Aliens vs Predator, and they’ve continued their run of wrong turns here. NeverDead isn’t just a bad game, but it’s one whose developer has unilaterally failed to capitalise on the unique concept it’s been gifted by Konami.
The developer clearly has no idea what to do with NeverDead’s clever concept, instead sending protagonist Bryce Boltzmann along corridor after corridor of woefully unvaried enemies, have him solve basic ‘puzzles’ (the most challenging simply requiring the player to roll his head up a seesaw), and repeat the (admittedly fun) ventilation shaft trick ad infinitum.
The dismemberment system (itself rather clever, with dismembered arms still able to shoot the guns they’re holding) is ignored completely, with Rebellion instead managing to make the mechanic more annoying than fun by blasting the player into a gazillion pieces at every possible opportunity.
To get your body back together, you’ve got to roll Bryce’s head around to find the pieces – a process that can be slow and tedious at the best of times, but one that becomes a mind-numbingly frequent event around the game’s mid-point. Worse still, the mechanic is made even more frustrating by the presence of ‘Grandbabies’ at almost every turn, tiny ball-shaped demons that suck up Bryce’s head and lead to an instant game over.
The shooting’s pathetic too, with guns so weak and feeble that they offer minimal feedback and accuracy (bizarrely, your aim is always off-centre unless you zoom in, stand still, or buy an upgrade), while an equally frail melee alternative turns the game into a thoughtless button masher. And, bar some relatively amusing sections in partner Arcadia’s apartment, the god-awful script and horrific soundtrack will have you reaching for the earplugs, with Rebellion’s attempts at humour falling flat on almost every occasion.
And that’s not all. The level design is just as dull as the execution of the core mechanic, with all the usual suspects – museums, churches, sewers, train stations, police stations etc – all held together by a story looser than a working girl’s drawers. It’s lazy, and a complete waste of the IP.
There is the odd semi-interesting scenario, although none of them are enough to act as the game’s saving grace. Bryce’s immortality means he can survive events players typically wouldn’t in other games, including being hit by speeding trains, sucked into a whirlwind or set on fire – the latter used fleetingly as a gameplay mechanic to let him light up darker areas. But once again, their implementation often seems daft and thoughtless, usually making an already tiresome section far more frustrating than it ever needed to be.
Had the developer chosen to build levels and half-decent puzzles around the opportunities provided by the dismemberment mechanic, NeverDead could have brought something new and interesting to the table. But instead, it’s an utterly dismissible and desperately frustrating shooter whose unique concept has been hopelessly lost on Rebellion.
VERDICT: 50%
This article was originally published in Issue 63 of 360Zine.
Tags: NeverDead
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