Deadlink – PS5 Review

From Warsaw-based developer Gruby Entertainment and publisher Crunching Koalas comes cyberpunk themed FPS Deadlink. As has become vogue, or de rigeur if you will, it has roguelite elements.

The schtick is that you’re the blunt instrument sent by the Corporate Security Agency to keep the megacorps by cracking open a few skulls. We guess the Deadlink part refers to the fact that your consciousness sticks around even after your latest attempt has come to an abrupt halt. Practically it translates to you battling through eight arenas until you reach a boss fight.

You control a robot combat shell, initially with just the basic Soldier class available. If you’re as inept as we are at this sort of thing, you’ll no doubt unlock the Hunter in fairly short order, as it becomes available after you’ve died a few times.

Unlike the likes of Dicey Dungeons though, subsequent classes don’t become available in short order, only becoming available upon completing the subsequent corporations. You’ll have to work hard to unlock the rest, put it that way.

Deadlink is a good-looking game, all pyrotechnics and neon effects. The speed you’re intended to fling yourself around the arenas is indicated during the useful tutorial level, though we found ourselves playing more as a standard shooter, rather than closing the distance to enemies using the dash function.

The first corporation you’ll face off against is Tora Heavy Industries, all tattooed yakuza sorts and ninja spies, backed up with spiderbots who have a mean line in guided missile strikes. The boss you’ll face is a harder version of these bots penned the Torantutula, let’s just say we’ve reached it a half dozen times, but only beaten it once.

The problem is that progression is very much reliant on successful runs, so you won’t be able to face off against the Watts-Rucker corporation until you’ve subdued Tora first. There’s no way to select the second corporation unfortunately. We get it, but at the same time we’ve grown a little bit weary facing the same enemies once and again.

Despite this weariness, we still feel compelled to play Deadlink. In fact, just writing about it has us wanting to play again. It’s just that we feel every single one of our five decades as soon as we enter each successive arena. Gone are the recharging shields we’d grown used to from the Halo series or the Uncharted games, instead you’re needing to keep your shields replenished by marking enemies with your special abilities, in the case of the soldier, him them with a grenade. Kill them and you get shield recharge shards. It makes you play smarter, though we just feel a bit overwhelmed when we’re at the end of each successive arena.

The power progression here is similar to many other roguelites in that you’ll probably struggle at the outset, with success only coming when you unlock a few upgrades. These are given to you via chips that you can equip in your combat chassis, generally to increase defensive prowess or add power or elemental powers to your loadout. They are restricted to particular slots by their power requirements though, so no getting too cute and putting multiple max power items in your slots. It’s a well implemented system that encourages you to come up with balanced loadouts.

One thing that Deadlink doesn’t do particularly well is mix up the feel of its arenas. There may be some procedural generation going on here, but we felt that each run felt broadly similar. It just exacerbates our desire to have the ability to fight the other enemies all the more. Why not let us face off against Watts-Rucker, then THI next? It’d mix things up a bit, plus it wouldn’t screw up the progression that much.

The weapons are good though, with plenty of heft and all manner of nice kinetic feedback as you dispatch enemies. Your primary weapon is fixed when it comes to each class, though you can unlock different secondary weapons including a rather hefty particle accelerator that reminds us of the amazing railgun from Quake II deathmatch.

We like the fact that we can save runs between the arenas, though we occasionally fall foul of saving a game mid-run and coming back to it later, wondering why the enemies we’re facing are harder than usual at the outset. If we hadn’t let our PS+ subscription lapse, we’d probably have resorted to some good old fashioned save scumming by now, not that we’d advocate such underhand tactics. Valid though they may be.

Deadlink tries to make you care about a plot of sorts, but it doesn’t amount to much, not really much more than some chatter from your male commander and the snarky tech lady. You’d scarcely know there was a plot, were it not for their frequent chatter via your PS5 controller speaker. Although the speaker is well used to let you know that your dash cooldown has passed and you can evade once again.

We can see ourselves returning to Deadlink every so often, if not mainlining it. Though as we sit here past one in the morning typing this, we still couldn’t help ourselves with a quick half hour session. It’s a very much a game you can dip in and out of, as opposed to our digital chocolate coated crack Balatro, there being no such thing as a quick game of that.

Like Balatro though, it can feel like the RNG conspires against you. If you get a bad loadout to start with, your run can often be over before it even begins and you’ll succumb quickly.

In conclusion, Deadlink is a canny cyberpunk FPS with a wide loadout of weapons and enemies. The special abilities and upgrade paths, though hackneyed, are well implemented. We just wish that it mixed things up a bit more as having to play through the same style levels can be a bit samey, familiarity definitely breeding contempt here. The fact you can save and resume where you’ve left off is very welcome though, just as it autosaves as we found out when we had a powercut the other day. The plot is largely forgettable, but the gameplay is good and compelling.