The difficulty is remedied somewhat by the inclusion of same screen couch co-op, a welcome addition in a space increasingly overshadowed by online multiplayer. There’s no real middle ground and long inescapable sieges, especially near the end, are extremely hard to manage if the meta game has been tearing you to shreds throughout your journey.ĭisclaimer: if you reach the final area (containing a very amusing cameo that I won’t spoil) without a full team, maybe a special character, great weapons and at least one explosive… you’re boned. Mid to late game sees a dramatic difficulty spike, and dozens more enemies on each map that will actively hunt you and your group of up to 4 survivors. Your first few supply hunts are easy abandoned hospitals or supermarkets with sparse zombie populations and relaxed AI behavior to match. With so many variables out of your control, a bad roll invites huge repercussions the further you progress. With axe and car keys in paw, he became the new playable character, carrying on the journey alone. In another more amusing turn of events, everyone died apart from my dog. Hungry and alone, Brodie the irritating bandit, died in the darkness of a log cabin as he searched fruitlessly for the car keys to an ice cream truck. In one instance my car broke down, an ambush event robbed me of half my supplies, whilst a hole in my bag claimed the other half. To many, this water cooler “what happened to you?” is the hook that keeps them playing, but others may quit in frustration. Even with a generous cache of supplies (which aren’t easy to have in excess), anything but a perfect game can see you stumble from happy, fed and healthy to destitute and starving in moments. It’s not uncommon to have your butt handed to you by 3 or 4 consecutive disasters completely out of your control. The RNG nature of these encounters can also be a double edged sword in terms of the gameplay itself. It proved far less amusing by the fourth or fifth occurrence. I laughed the first time a car passed my hopeful survivors shouting “NEEERRRRRDDDD!” resulting in a huge loss of morale. Play the game long enough though, and encounters repeat themselves a little too often. Will you crash through a checkpoint or go around? Will you select someone to clean the poo off of a food crate or leave it alone? The self-aware writing adds to the comedy and a character effectively dying from “extreme annoyance” has never been so darkly amusing. Random social encounters in the overworld offer decisions on your next course of action. Without fuel your car is useless, without food and meds your characters will starve, get hurt, and maybe even abandon you. The background changes as you venture further towards Canada and resources such as fuel and food continuously deplete. That said, traits provide gameplay variation in numerous amusing ways and although the ability for full-on custom creation is present, I often stuck to randomly generated characters providing emergent scenarios that I didn’t expect.Įach playthrough of Death Road consists of two distinct layers: The overworld, where your car (many of the vehicles reference classic movies, like the dog car from Dumb and Dumber etc) continuously side-scrolls along the aforementioned “Death Road”, and the mission tile sets where you’ll search for supplies and weapons, rescue survivors and battle zombies in one of the half dozen or so game types. But there’s not much explanation of how each trait affects the game and some more in-depth info would’ve been appreciated. A paranoid survivor will have contingencies for unforeseen encounters, the irritating trait will see your companions’ morale erode much faster than normal as you make stupid noises and always seem to say the wrong thing. Starting off, you’ll create a main character and a buddy, complete with various appearance options, roles and social stats.
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