by Andrew FarrellWhat do you get if you take Batman: Arkham‘s combat, mix it with a rhythm game, and throw it into several short levels? Well, you get Dead as Disco, that’s what! The game has just entered early access and is set to stay there for at least a year as it receives new combat mechanics, levels, and bosses to fight. At launch, there are five levels, in addition to the endless mode available in the demo. The game has a long way to go and is sure to receive lots of additional polish, but is Dead as Disco worth it in early access?
The game has a pretty standard setup. The protagonist, Charlie Disco, is dead and finds himself in hell. After making a deal with the devil, he has to fight his former bandmates to try and convince them to change their ways. There are currently five musicians to fight across their own levels and each is kicked off with some voiced dialogue. The game’s presentation is vibrant and quiet colorful, even if the neon-soaked aesthetic can feel a little slight from time to time.
Levels are incredibly simple here; you fight in little arenas that are swapped out as you defeat waves of enemies. After just a few minutes, the boss shows up, and you have to fight them and win. Doing so will reward you with a new special attack that can be set to one of the face buttons. I’m honestly not crazy about this format, as the levels themselves feel incredibly short, and the forced change of scenery after completing them feels anticlimactic. The game often switches you to a new arena before you’ve even had the chance to dispatch all the enemies, which I strongly disliked, as it makes each level feel more like padding building up to the boss fight.
Combat, as I specified before, really is just basically ripped wholesale from Batman. You have a default attack that you use to hit enemies (although you also get a charge attack that can be used to push enemies away or even let you juggle them), you press another button to parry enemy strikes (with perfect parries giving you a larger boon), and another to finish stunned enemies. Naturally, defeating foes builds up a meter that lets you use an instant takedown (which does extra damage to bosses). Instead of batarangs, Charlie throws drumsticks, but the game is far from shy regarding its inspiration.
As you land blows, you’ll also fill up a special gauge that you can use for special moves, which you can think of as similar to Batman’s gadgets. For instance, the default one lets you unleash a flurry of punches, but another sees you slam foes with a guitar. It all feels decent enough. I don’t like it as much as the combat in, say, Arkham Knight, but it feels impactful and decently satisfying. The levels are just too short and not all that interesting. The real meat, however, is in the boss fights.
I don’t really care for these. The bosses are often spongey, with long, drawn-out fights that only feature a checkpoint at the very start. Dying (which is very easy early on without unlocking more health) sees you start these fights from the beginning. Beating a level unlocks a harder difficulty, and simply playing nets you points you can use to fill out skill trees (one for each special attack), in addition to new cosmetics or items you can buy for the bar that Charlie uses as his base. All in all, there’s not much in this to justify the price tag, even if the game’s launch discount prices it at $20.
Due to a lack of content, simplicity of the game’s levels, and the extreme familiarity of its action, I don’t quite think Dead as Disco is worth picking up in early access. It’s a decent game, but with only a couple of hours of content and a lack of true complexity in its systems, I don’t see much to really hook most people. Perhaps that’ll change as the game’s development progresses, but for now, I wouldn’t spend the cash on it.
Dead as Disco
