Dead Cells: Its Dark Souls But Boring

Yes, I know I promised to do Kamen Rider this week but as it turns out, trying to fit 48 episode long series within a week with still enough time for school, writing, making videos and living in general is pretty hard. So yeah, the Kamen Rider review has been pushed back until next week but don’t worry, I had this as a back up. So one of my friends on steam has saw that I had Dead Cells on my Wishlist and instead of gifting it to me, he just gave me his account details and let me play it on his account. I meaN, it’s efficient but it’s still pretty risky to trust your details to someone else but who am I to complain? I get to try before I buy so after violating his steam profile, I downloaded the game on my laptop and played it while watching Ex Aid and well, don’t expect this to be pleasant review like every other review outlet has done so far. Also, I have very limited knowledge on Dark Souls so if I make any references to Dark Souls, feel free to correct me where I am wrong but don’t do it in that normal Dark Souls way of screaming it at the person in an aggressive manner. With that out of the way, let’s get ready to die and die over again from boredom.

Dead Cells’ plot is like UBERMOSH’s plot which is means it’s super vague. To my understanding, a kingdom gets messed up by this virus that makes everyone into monsters and I think the king is to be blamed. Our character is a weird moss thing that keeps attaching itself to the same deheaded body of a prisoner and his goal is to make it to the kings room to probably kill him, I don’t know. I only have it made as far as the castle once because of reasons I will rip into later but it seems like you are harvesting cells to give to this collector guy which helps you unlock new equipment for later runs. It’s all just super vague and this is what I pieced together from the very little lore given to us through the t two runs, the area descriptions and whenever the game decides to spawn in a bit of background for our character to gawk at. While the plot isn’t very necessary, I’m going to bring up my original complaint from UBERMOSH and say that they should of made the lore a lot more accessible and not make it super vague but now I will add the additional compliant of don’t make it RNG based. I will be getting into that RNG thing later but the fact that the lore is tied to RNG is very annoying and unfortunately, that’s not the only thing that’s RNG.

The gameplay is pretty much Dark Souls except it’s 2D which means you don’t need to worry about dodging attacks on an extra axis and you still have the metrovania style of gameplay. Pretty much, you just slash at something until they die and you can dodge their attacks if you somehow can time it right considering everything has a delay to them. Yeah, I’m going to complain about the controls now because I hate them because everything has a delay which makes combat very annoying. I was playing this game at a nice smooth 60 FPS and there was this very annoying one second delay between my input and the command being executed. This makes dodging near impossible unless you have near future sight and if you are using a shield (because bows are for sensible human beings who like using range to their advantage), you might as well be rolling an dice when you wanna parry something. It’s just something that makes combat very tedious and means you are going to be burning through your health flasks quick. Alright, tangent done, let’s talk about the equipment you can get. You have constantly five slots with two slots dedicated for your melee and ranged weapons which includes your shields and two slots for your throwables with one slot for your health flasks. The melee weapons have the most diversity amongst them since you can choose whips, swords of different sizes, spears and hammers if you get lucky while your throwables range from grenades to turrets. Now, I don’t mind this approach because it allows the player to dedicate their style of approaching the combat but there is one little tiny thing that just ruins it but we will get there. This being a very metrovania style game, you can explore the randomly generated levels and dictate your path to the King’s Throne. On top of this, you are getting Cells that allow you to use them to unlock equipment for later runs and even runes which can What I also don’t mind is the fact they reward speed running with timed gates which can be unlocked if you reach them before the time is up and here’s a very helpful hint: Don’t even try to get to those gates. You will get more out of your run if you take the time and explore so it’s nice idea in concept but it’s horrible just like my main problem with this game.

A quick diversion before I talk about my main issue with the game and before you all ask, the graphics are fine. The cell shaded style makes the game look ok and while the character and enemy design can be a bit bland, I find everything else quite serviceable what it sets out to achieve. So what is my main complaint about this game? Simple, it’s too hard. Before you all give me your biggest Dark Souls “git gud”, here’s my reasoning why. To my understanding, everything in Dark Souls is hard coded from what you find in what area to where secrets are with the only RNG being attack patterns so it takes knowledge to know where these sort of things are and make your experience easier in later runs. Dead Cells has none of that. Yes, it does have RNG when it comes to attack patterns but the RNG doesn’t stop there. This game is a rogue like dungeon crawler with RNG elements and that’s what makes this game hard, especially as one that tries to ape on Dark Souls. Your equipment that you start with and you find is randomised, the level layout is randomised and what you can buy in shops is randomised. This level of RNG ruins the game because it now makes your preferred playstyle hard to achieve and this can make your run either much more harder or a cake walk. You know why I only got to the castle once during my many and many runs? It’s because I finally got lucky and for the equipment I needed to get that far but consider that only happened because of a one in million chance happened after hours of grinding cells. This RNG paired with the very annoying one second delay I mentioned earlier makes the combat very frustrated and turns what should be a skill based combat system into a DnD battle and that is what makes boss fights so frustrating, especially against Conjuctivitus. That boss is near impossible with the one second delay.

I would be probably been a lot easier on this game if I wasn’t in a slump right now but my point still stands. Even if they fix that one second delay, the RNG is rooted into the game mechanics which means unless they end up rooting the whole thing, it’s going to be permanently ruining the game. If you still wanna try it, go ahead but I don’t really recommend it. If you want a Dark Souls like game, just play Dark Souls or wait for “You Only Die Twice” next year. If there was a sale for the game, go get it but not at full price because this here is a solid 4/10. Next week is Kamen Rider Ex Aid and after that, maybe Fire Force. Until then, just check out my YouTube channel in the side bar if you want to see my other content and also my steam profile is there if you want to donate me anything for these reviews.