Ebb And Flow
HIGH The slow-mo teleport ability.
LOW The boss with the hammer.
WTF Gripping the controller so hard that my hands hurt.
I’m nearly dead. I’ve run out of armor, and my health bar is rapidly depleting.
In a desperate gambit, I launch my grappling hook at the nearest enemy and fly towards him, shotgun cocked and ready. I blast him in the face and quickly turn, mark a group of his buddies and launch a shockwave at them. Diving backward, I lob a grenade and watch them explode into a shower of armor shards. With my shields renewed by the shards, I surge towards the remaining enemies with vengeance on my mind.
A first-person shooter with roguelite elements, Deadlink eschews innovation in favor of a push and pull between life and death, and at a glance, there’s little new here. Recruited by the Corporate Security Agency, the player controls a robotic combat shell aimed at combatting mega-corporations. Each run takes place within a simulation designed to prepare the player for battling these mega-corps in the real world. The straightforward cyberpunk setting complete with neon lit streets, cybernetic yakuza,
and shady corporations doesn’t exactly light the imagination on fire.
The mechanics are equally familiar — enter an arena, shoot everything ‘til it’s dead, choose an upgrade, rinse and repeat. However, I found something deeply compelling about Deadlink’s insistence on keeping me seconds away from both victory and defeat at all times.
Deadlink offers four classes to pick from at the beginning of a run, each equipped with two abilities and weapons. The classes unlock progressively after reaching certain milestones, and each time I found a new favorite. The hunter with its ability to turn invisible and instantly swap places with any enemy in view provided me ample opportunity to land headshots and quickly retreat. The juggernaut offers a melee option with a graviton fist that propelled me across the screen to smash into whichever adversary was unfortunate enough to be in my sights.
In addition to providing mobility and combat advantages, these class abilities also enable the player to “mark” enemies. These enemies are then highlighted on-screen for easier tracking and, when killed, reward the player with necessary shield pick-ups to keep their armor topped up. Playing as the soldier class,I could use the grappling hook to quickly close distance with an adversary while marking them in the process and then follow up with a blast from the scrambler which marks any nearby cohorts. Uncovering the nuances and synergies of each class’s abilities becomes the linchpin of success in Deadlink.
After choosing a class, the enemies hit hard and fast – one moment I’m fully stocked and feeling confident, and in a heartbeat my health and armor are at the redline. At first I was frustrated by this. It’s sometimes difficult to tell where enemies are attacking from, and even the toughest classes feel fragile. However, once I tuned into the rhythm of my abilities and began understanding how to deploy them while marking as many enemies as possible, suddenly each arena became a smorgasbord of shield
pickups — in many cases, far more than I can even hold. Most shooters ask the player to avoid getting hit, Deadlink demanded that I lean into the pain and come out stronger on the other side.
The strong sense of progression and persistence between runs helps to soften the difficulty. XP and tokens are earned and can be redeemed for permanent upgrades afterwards, whether a run is successful or not. These range from the mundane but useful (permanent health and armor upgrades) to the more exciting and expensive, such as an ability for the engineer class that allows the player to drop two turrets on the battlefield to even the odds. Deadlink isn’t easy, and any frustration I felt was mitigated by the sense that I was always moving forward, even when I was losing.
Though the combat is highly reliant on twitchy aim, there is an element of strategy. Between each combat arena the player is offered a choice of power-ups. These come in different categories, and careful consideration is a requirement. There are run-makers, such as the ability to summon a drone to distract enemies, or the soldier’s grappling hook that resets its cooldown almost instantaneously after killing an enemy, significantly improving the player’s mobility. There are also plenty of lackluster options (it’s hard to get excited about a ten percent chance to poison) but when I landed the ability to gain an additional over-shield, the serotonin started pumping.
Deadlink isn’t perfect, however. Each class comes equipped with a primary weapon (shotgun, revolver or machine gun) and a secondary, featuring variants on rocket launchers and flamethrowers. I could never find much use for any of the secondaries, and while there may be subtleties I didn’t uncover, they generally felt underpowered.
While it’s certainly a mechanics -title, I didn’t expect much from Deadlink’s boilerplate cyberpunk trappings or it’s tale of corporate espionage. That said, I was surprised to find myself drawn in by the characters and always looking forward to their praise or admonishments. Despite their archetypical design (aloof scientist, stern military man and quirky hacker) the encounters were generally strong, and there’s good world-building to be found.
Unfortunately, any narrative momentum is cut short by the lackluster ending. Each run takes place in a simulation, and there’s an implication that each attempt is building towards a major shift. This ramp-up left me expecting a change in play, but the final reveal falls back on tired cyberpunk tropes and offered none of the mechanical implications Deadlink had suggested.
Deadlink doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Despite its shortcomings, it presents a well-tuned, fast-paced experience that remains engaging from start to finish, and on more than one occasion I found myself so locked in that my knuckles were hurting from gripping my controller. Deadlink asks its players to walk a thin line between success and failure, and in so doing captures a sense of intensity that vastly overshadows its lack of variety and disappointing story. Anytime I find myself in need of a quick shot of
adrenaline, I have a feeling that Deadlink will be my fix for a good while now.
Rating: 8.5 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed by Gruby Entertainment and published by Crunching Koalas. It is currently available on XBX/S, PS5, and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 18 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are online leaderboards for one of the modes, but there are no formal multiplayer modes.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Strong Language. While the violence in Deadlink is stylized and not terribly realistic, it is pervasive and intense. When killed, enemies explode into sprays of blood and body parts, and the only means of interacting with the world is through violence. All of the major four letter words are present and accounted for. There is an option to disable the gore.
Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are present. There are three settings — Deuteranope, Protanope, and Tritanope.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Only the text during combat can be re-sized, the main dialogue subtitles cannot be resized.
While all of the in-game dialogue is subtitled, the final cutscene does not have subtitles, and this un-subtitled dialogue contains the major reveal for the narrative. This reveal is expounded on somewhat after the cutscene, but it’s a major oversight.
All in-game audio cues have on-screen indicators, however the action is so frantic and there is so much visual noise on the screen that they’re easy to miss. While the cooldowns for the main abilities can be relocated to the center of the screen to make them easier to see, the cooldowns for the grenade and dash abilities are stuck on the edges, making them difficult to spot during heavy action.
Finally, at random intervals in between stages there are audio cues that indicate a secret in the area. Some of these have a corresponding icon on the screen, but not all of them. I could not see a pattern to when this indicator was present, and these would be all but impossible for a non-hearing gamer to find without the visual indicator.
Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.
Following this introduction, Ryan dove headlong into the 16 and 64-bit eras, culminating in the year 2000 with a fateful visit to the local game shop.On the recommendation of a saintly store clerk, Ryan picked up a copy of Deus Ex and, shortly thereafter, embarked on the vain quest to find a game that tops it.
This journey has led Ryan to GameCritics where he attempts to articulate why he still finds this medium so compelling.When not playing or writing about games, Ryan can be found watching competition reality television with his wife, their dog, and three cats.
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