Great game with a fair amount of content.

Dead Effect is an Indie shooter in which you murder zombies, upgrade your weapons, and just try to stay alive. It is a little generic and does not have anything unique or memorable, but I still think this is an amazing game for what it is.

You got a story mode, consisting of twelve levels in which you try to find the course of a zombie outbreak aboard of the ESS Meridian. You just woke up from your cryostasis sleep and learn what happened on the ship. You are contacted by a doctor called Dr. Wagner and he helps you understand what happened, leads you trough the ship and offers you assistance in your efforts to stay alive.

Dr. Wagner wants you to meet him to decide what to do next. When you finally get close to him, he reveals that you are not on the ESS Meridian but on a big ass space research centre and that you yourself are part of the “Dead Effect experiment”. The virus is man made and injected on purpose to the crew for scientific purposes. Baffled by this plot twist, you chase Dr. Wagner, find him at the core of the station and kill his ass. You escape the research center and the main game ends.

Besides the story missions, you got survival maps and missions in “Biohazard mode”. Completing these missions earns cash and special bonuses to upgrade the fourteen weapons the game has to offer. The missions are challenging and require some strategy instead of mindlessly blazing your way through. Every mission also has a specific challenge to complete. Do this, and you earn a nice bonus.

The gun play is actually pretty good and feels natural. You point a shotgun at the head of the zombie in front of you and their head explodes and you blast him away. Rifles have great accuracy and aim well. You can earn upgrades for the weapons and with enough cash, that you find lying around maps or by clearing stages, you can max them out eventually, making them a lot stronger.

Besides the weapons you also got some special skills like Bullet Time (slow motion) and “Devastation” in which you make a big boom, damaging as many zombies in the area as possible. It is a nice extra to the game, although it makes Dead Effect ridiculously easy at times.

The graphics are actually quite nice in Dead Effect. It is nothing mind blowing but the zombie models, their walk cycles and attacks are all fluent and polished. The environments look all the same, sure, but the contrast with the many different zombie models and species is actually the redeeming factor here. Combine this with nice explosion, fire and Bullet Time effects, and it is good actually.

The sound and the in-game music are great. Bullet fire, explosions, zombie grunts and environmental damage all sound good. The ambient music and battle tracks are nice and enhance your game by fair amount.

The only complaint with this game that I had was the hit detection with the lightning glove, the weapon that you start with. A specific achievement/challenge required you to make twenty head shots with the bloody thing, a feat that was really hard to accomplish because the attack was all over the place and many times, I just zapped one of those brain dead suckers, destroying my streak. It was a little disappointing.

Although Dead Effect is certainly not the best game ever or something unique, it still felt like a fairly decent game, and I enjoyed it very much. The good gun play, the nice impact of your bullets and attacks on zombies and the overall decent look of the game made it fun to play. There are a lot of achievements too that you can earn, giving you even more purpose to play the game and maxing everything out.

In the end, I would surely recommend Dead Effect, despite its simplicity.