Dead Effect Review - Lost in Space?

It’s hard at times to write a review without feeling at least a little bad. Not because what’s going to be said isn’t true, but maybe, just maybe, you could be generous. Is it really the game’s fault? Would your impression have been better had you played it on release, on the original platform? Then of course you come to your senses and understand that ultimately, it was the choice of the developer or publisher to release the version you had the misfortune of playing through.

To preemptively balance my coming statements, I need to say that for a game designed for tablets, Dead Effect is quite gorgeous. The models of the zombies (spoilers: there are lots of zombies in it) are well designed, as are the guns and the scenery is great to look at, or at least as great to look at as samey gun-metal grey corridors can be. This, however, is where most of the positives end.

In no short terms, Dead Effect can be mind-numbingly tedious. All twelve missions featured in the story, each clocking in between ten to twenty-five minutes, is composed of linear corridors filled with unfathomable numbers of zombies for what is meant to be a research vessel. Granted, you don’t find this out until later on, with story bits being drip fed to the player by a terrible German voice that practically screams “bad guy”.

A major problem comes with the fact that even in what should be straight forward and tight levels, you are somehow led into backtracking just too many times. The biggest and most annoying case of this happens where your weapons and space suit is taken from you, but somehow only removing the objective indicator and none of the other HUD elements.

But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. From a game so slapdash that the main character even wakes up out of a cryo-chamber with the space suit on, while all the other broken ones around have people dressed in plain clothes. A game that out of the blue, for the sake of plot contrivance, tells you that you are actually infected with the zombie virus. But wait a second, you have the chance to heal yourself and the healing process has an unusual side-effect as an automated voice is happy to say; it gives you the ability to slow down time.

One thing I have to mention, just to get it off of my chest, is that there is a zombie that throws grenades. Grenades that almost always one-shot you. Now, far be it for me to question the ability of zombies in warfare, but since when have they started to be able to accurately throw grenades from twenty plus meters away? It’s made all the more frustrating when in certain sections there is literally nowhere to hide and sometimes you don’t even know a grenade is on you until you’ve become a big red stain on the wall.

Of course it doesn’t end with that. At the end of each level is a cut to a shop, because for some inexplicable reason cash is strewn around this ship in such copious amounts you could be forgiven for thinking it belongs to Jordan Belfort in his more seedy days. In said shop you can purchase new weapons and upgrades to current weapons, as well as ammo and grenades (although you don’t usually need to buy ammo because that’s also left strewn around the ship with reckless abandon).

This shop is also an indicator of Dead Effect originally being a free to play mobile game with in-app purchases (IAP). The majority of the weapons are bought with credits that you find strewn around, or from playing the alternative game modes (Survival, just staying alive until the timer runs out, or Biohazard, which is just defending against waves of zombies) or gold bars, which were the IAP currency and now drop randomly in very low quantities or from beating the alternate modes.

One other thing done for the sake of padding out length, or simply just because other games have done it, is the inclusion of collectables. Each level has a number of tablets left laid around on the floor with emails designed to give backstory on the situation. Certain glyphs also appear on walls, which you are meant to shoot, as collecting them unlocks bits and pieces like biographies on characters and writeups about weapons. Really, they’re there just for the people who like to collect things, useful or not.

Sure, at the end of it all Dead Effect isn’t an outright bad game. It’s just bland, uninspired and sometimes boring. There are far worse out there. Maybe I am being harsh and I should feel bad. It’s a small, four to five hour, shooter developed originally for iOS and Android with the usual added game modes on top. To expect the variety we see in true-blue PC and console games is perhaps slightly unfair, but again, this is a review of the PC version and there are far better games on this platform; the game’s mobile version probably compares much more favourably with its competitors.