Deadlight: Director’s Cut is a fine game if you look at the main story mode. Story and characters are not good but the art style and gameplay keeps you hooked. However, if you go for the platinum trophy like me and delve deeper into the systems of the game with the other modes Survival and Nightmare; you will see how broken this game is. And while I did finish the main story in 6 hours, that was my all collectibles run. You can easily finish this game in 3 hours, even less. If you are interested and the price seems good to you for 3 hours, go for it. But definitely don’t get into this game thinking about trying those two other modes and I don’t recommend going for the platinum on this one.
The Full Review(No Spoilers):
Good Ideas, Bad Execution
Deadlight: Director’s Cut is a remastered version of Deadlight from PS3 that came out on PS4 and Xbox One. I played the original game a little bit on PC when it came out but I haven’t finished it. It was leaving PS Plus so I decided to finally go back and finish the game. And unfortunately, I found a pretty mediocre experience.
Deadlight’s story is unfortunately one of the weakest parts of it. We play a man named Randall in a zombie apocalypse and we try to reunite with our wife and daughter that we lost. The story is a mystery. Why did we lose our wife and daughter? Where are they? But unfortunately, the ending of the game is not good. It gives us the answers we were looking for but they are not good answers.
Character wise, it’s even worse. Randall is the only character you will remember in the game and he doesn’t have much of a personality. This game really hasn’t been developed with a story and characters in mind. So what about the gameplay?
Deadlight is a 2D action puzzle platformer. Randall was a park ranger so he is pretty good with jumping from platform to platform, wall to wall, building to building. Platforming is simple but fun. Unfortunately, it’s also very buggy and glitchy. That causes a problem in some sequences where you need to do platforming fast and it especially causes problems in a certain game mode. We’ll come back to that.
Puzzle sections are also very easy. Mostly it’s about trying to get to the next platform. You might need to do some exploring and you might need to push or pull some boxes, switch on or off some levers etc. It’s all the usual stuff but it’s enjoyable. The problem with the gameplay is mostly in the combat part.
Combat is not fun. Thankfully it’s optional in most cases but this causes a problem in a certain game mode as well, we’ll come back to that in a minute. Let me explain how the combat works first. We both have melee and ranged combat. Ranged combat works fine. We have a pistol and a shotgun, ammo is tough to find so you need to use it carefully; again it’s the usual stuff.
Unfortunately though, melee combat doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. In order to kill a zombie in melee combat, you need to do a charged attack when the zombie is on the ground. It works for one zombie and sometimes two zombies. More than two, melee just becomes impossible to do. Zombies grabs you, you try to mash a button, your health bars goes off one by one, it’s not a fun experience.
Main story mode doesn’t have much combat, but there is a mode that has a lot of combat. Before that, main story took me around 6 hours to complete and I tried to find all the collectibles. That’s a pretty good runtime in my mind. I enjoyed the main story. And collectibles, well they are okay. There are two types of them, one of them are the lore ones. You collect diary pages and clues and they give you more information about the character you are controlling, Randall, and the world.
The other type is the more important one with the upgrades. Health upgrades and stamina upgrades. These are important, but they are also very well hidden. Without a guide, they will be hard to find. But again, they are useful. Especially stamina upgrades.
After finishing the main story, you can and probably should delete the game but if you want to continue there are 2 more modes. One of them is the Survival Mode. This is the mode where you try to survive, as much as possible. It’s endless. But this is where the combat shows how broken it is. This mode just spawns zombies crazily, and the combat just stops working. You also see how broken the platforming is because sometimes you will have to run away from the horde. This mode was not that fun and getting the 2 trophies required for this mode was a pain.
However, this mode feels like heaven compared to the third and final mode in the game. Nightmare Mode. You play the main story again, but with no health upgrades. Less ammo. And if you die, you go back to the beginning of that certain act. There are 3 acts in total. You might lose 30 minutes at worst, 10 minutes at best if you at the end of an act.
This mode unlocks after beating the main story if I remember correctly so you will already know the solutions for every puzzle which makes it go faster. But, here is the totally crazy and unnecessary difficulty. Let’s say that you played for 2,3 hours and finally beat Act I. You will now start from Act II. So you wanted to close the game and continue tomorrow.
Nope, you can’t do that. Because closing the game resets the acts. So you need to go through all the acts in one sitting, without dying every act. And in this mode, you see all the broken stuff in the game. Your character might not want to grab that ledge, it might want to jump in the opposite direction you wanted it to, your melee weapon swing get go inside a zombie or your button press might just not register.
Technically, this game is a trainwreck. It is horrible. Bugs and glitches are having a carnival in this game. Sounds are also weird. The only good thing technically is the art style. I really liked it. And there are also a lot of locations. Cities, Sewers, Hospital etc. I don’t want to spoil some late game locations.
Deadlight: Director’s Cut is a fine game if you look at the main story mode. Story and characters are not good but the art style and gameplay keeps you hooked. However, if you go for the platinum trophy like me and delve deeper into the systems of the game with the other modes Survival and Nightmare; you will see how broken this game is. And while I did finish the main story in 6 hours, that was my all collectibles run. You can easily finish this game in 3 hours, even less. If you are interested and the price seems good to you for 3 hours, go for it. But definitely don’t get into this game thinking about trying those two other modes and I don’t recommend going for the platinum on this one.
The Full Review(No Spoilers):
Good Ideas, Bad Execution
Deadlight: Director’s Cut is a remastered version of Deadlight from PS3 that came out on PS4 and Xbox One. I played the original game a little bit on PC when it came out but I haven’t finished it. It was leaving PS Plus so I decided to finally go back and finish the game. And unfortunately, I found a pretty mediocre experience.
Deadlight’s story is unfortunately one of the weakest parts of it. We play a man named Randall in a zombie apocalypse and we try to reunite with our wife and daughter that we lost. The story is a mystery. Why did we lose our wife and daughter? Where are they? But unfortunately, the ending of the game is not good. It gives us the answers we were looking for but they are not good answers.
Character wise, it’s even worse. Randall is the only character you will remember in the game and he doesn’t have much of a personality. This game really hasn’t been developed with a story and characters in mind. So what about the gameplay?
Deadlight is a 2D action puzzle platformer. Randall was a park ranger so he is pretty good with jumping from platform to platform, wall to wall, building to building. Platforming is simple but fun. Unfortunately, it’s also very buggy and glitchy. That causes a problem in some sequences where you need to do platforming fast and it especially causes problems in a certain game mode. We’ll come back to that.
Puzzle sections are also very easy. Mostly it’s about trying to get to the next platform. You might need to do some exploring and you might need to push or pull some boxes, switch on or off some levers etc. It’s all the usual stuff but it’s enjoyable. The problem with the gameplay is mostly in the combat part.
Combat is not fun. Thankfully it’s optional in most cases but this causes a problem in a certain game mode as well, we’ll come back to that in a minute. Let me explain how the combat works first. We both have melee and ranged combat. Ranged combat works fine. We have a pistol and a shotgun, ammo is tough to find so you need to use it carefully; again it’s the usual stuff.
Unfortunately though, melee combat doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. In order to kill a zombie in melee combat, you need to do a charged attack when the zombie is on the ground. It works for one zombie and sometimes two zombies. More than two, melee just becomes impossible to do. Zombies grabs you, you try to mash a button, your health bars goes off one by one, it’s not a fun experience.
Main story mode doesn’t have much combat, but there is a mode that has a lot of combat. Before that, main story took me around 6 hours to complete and I tried to find all the collectibles. That’s a pretty good runtime in my mind. I enjoyed the main story. And collectibles, well they are okay. There are two types of them, one of them are the lore ones. You collect diary pages and clues and they give you more information about the character you are controlling, Randall, and the world.
The other type is the more important one with the upgrades. Health upgrades and stamina upgrades. These are important, but they are also very well hidden. Without a guide, they will be hard to find. But again, they are useful. Especially stamina upgrades.
After finishing the main story, you can and probably should delete the game but if you want to continue there are 2 more modes. One of them is the Survival Mode. This is the mode where you try to survive, as much as possible. It’s endless. But this is where the combat shows how broken it is. This mode just spawns zombies crazily, and the combat just stops working. You also see how broken the platforming is because sometimes you will have to run away from the horde. This mode was not that fun and getting the 2 trophies required for this mode was a pain.
However, this mode feels like heaven compared to the third and final mode in the game. Nightmare Mode. You play the main story again, but with no health upgrades. Less ammo. And if you die, you go back to the beginning of that certain act. There are 3 acts in total. You might lose 30 minutes at worst, 10 minutes at best if you at the end of an act.
This mode unlocks after beating the main story if I remember correctly so you will already know the solutions for every puzzle which makes it go faster. But, here is the totally crazy and unnecessary difficulty. Let’s say that you played for 2,3 hours and finally beat Act I. You will now start from Act II. So you wanted to close the game and continue tomorrow.
Nope, you can’t do that. Because closing the game resets the acts. So you need to go through all the acts in one sitting, without dying every act. And in this mode, you see all the broken stuff in the game. Your character might not want to grab that ledge, it might want to jump in the opposite direction you wanted it to, your melee weapon swing get go inside a zombie or your button press might just not register.
Technically, this game is a trainwreck. It is horrible. Bugs and glitches are having a carnival in this game. Sounds are also weird. The only good thing technically is the art style. I really liked it. And there are also a lot of locations. Cities, Sewers, Hospital etc. I don’t want to spoil some late game locations.
Deadlight: Director’s Cut is a fine game if you look at the main story mode. Story and characters are not good but the art style and gameplay keeps you hooked. However, if you go for the platinum trophy like me and delve deeper into the systems of the game with the other modes Survival and Nightmare; you will see how broken this game is. And while I did finish the main story in 6 hours, that was my all collectibles run. You can easily finish this game in 3 hours, even less. If you are interested and the price seems good to you for 3 hours, go for it. But definitely don’t get into this game thinking about trying those two other modes and I don’t recommend going for the platinum on this one.
2 Comments
This comment was deleted
@Yultimona Thank you so much for the feedback, it's really helpful. I will work on it in the future reviews!
Vaudevillain
1 year ago