Deadly Days Review (Xbox Series S)
Our Deadly Days Review introduces us to this unique strategic rogue-lite in the zombie apocalypse. Manage and protect a group of survivors and help them to stop the catastrophe. Discover and use a large number of wild and crazy objects, even wilder and crazier survivors, special abilities, and deadly weapons.
Deadly Days Review Pros:
- Pixel art graphics.
- 918.6MB download size.
- 1000 Gamerscore.
- Pixel font – on/off.
- Strategic Zombie survival roguelike gameplay.
- Online leaderboards.
- Opening and ongoing tutorials.
- Basecamp – you go out and scavenge supplies and weapons for your Survivors.
- You need at least one food per survivor by the end of the day or they starve.
- When out scavenging you just choose where they go and don’t directly control them.
- Has a Dead By Winter vibe to it. (boardgame)
- The map uncovers as you move.
- Food is also used to level up Survivors at the camp.
- Scrap is like currency and is used to unlock new slots or upgrade items.
- Special powers – you can find and upgrade special powers that can be used once a day.
- A scavenge trip is a day in-game.
- Base items will give passive to your Survivors.
- Weapons can be found, sold, bought, upgraded, and repaired. Assign weapons to Survivors at base camp.
- Missions – random mission cards will be shown and you pick one. Each mission has a 1 – 5 difficulty rating for size, loot, and danger.
- Auto button to get all Survivors back to the bus.
- Recruit and befriend Survivors.
- Survivors have unique stats, abilities, and quirks.
- Has an RTS feel to the controlling of your troop.
- Burger shops – destroy them to get map pieces.
- Nighttime – can happen when out scavenging and this is when zombies are stronger.
- Earn EXP at the end of a run and level up to unlock new permanent features.
- Daily challenge.
- Survivors will shoot on sight automatically.
- The camera allows you to pan around and zoom in.
- Place the marker for your troop to follow or hold A and they will follow it wherever.
- Slight environmental destruction.
- Buildings and cars will shine when they can be looted.
- Specializations are what you pick before you start a new run, they have unique unlocks and passives attached to them.
- Encyclopedia fills in as you discover things like weapons, Survivors, zombies, etc, and gives a brief overview of them.
- You can select individual Survivors which makes healing them easier.
- You can buy and expand your base with new rooms and workshops.
- The game revolves around material collecting and survival.
- Can pause the game.
- Lightning-fast loading times.
Deadly Days Review Cons:
- The music doesn’t suit the game at all.
- Slow starter.
- No timer to show how long looting will take or should I say it does but it is always obscured from view.
- Small hard to read text.
- Never sure it has been saved.
- The pathfinding breaks often with a survivor randomly staying still or going off on his own.
- Gets so hectic that it’s hard to manage everything.
- It just gets fiddly.
- Difficulty spikes aplenty.
- RNG can indeed screw you.
- Only one control layout.
- No way to Invert the axis or tweak sensitivity sliders.
- Doesn’t have a Colourblind option.
- The day-night cycle feels short.
- Hard to manage multiple people especially when attacking and looting at the same time.
- Nighttime is a pain in the ass.
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Deadly Days:
Developer: Pixelsplit
Publisher: Assemble Entertainment
Store Links –
- Graphics - 7/107/10
- Sound - 5/105/10
- Accessibility - 7/107/10
- Length - 9/109/10
- Fun Factor - 8/108/10
Summary
Deadly Days is a game that has some absolutely solid ideas and mechanics, I instantly likened it to one of my favorite board games Dead of Winter. In both, you start with random Survivors in a dilapidated base camp and need to go to random locations to scavenge food and materials. Zombies will lurk everywhere and you get an idea of the threat before you head out thanks to the location cards. You get dealt 3 random cards each with a location showing the size, danger, and chances of loot. It’s a nice touch that adds replayability but more importantly adds atmosphere to it all. Food is needed to level up survivors but also to feed everyone and stop them starving to death. The basecamp can be upgraded and extended to include new crafting options and food ideas, you have a set of reusable powers like small airstrikes and healing (both of which work on timer cooldowns) but you can get much better more powerful passives later on. In terms of character development, you can level them up to increase stats and put new weapons on them. Scraps are the currency for repairing the base, weapons and adding new slots to actions. Into the actual gameplay and it’s a kind of an isometric view and you move people around with a pointer ala RTS style controls. Survivors will auto-attack on sight but can be made to. Looting is a case of clicking the shiny location and waiting, you can’t ever see the timer so it is just a waiting game. The cool part of it all is the bus. You can’t just jump straight back on, it has a cooldown on it but when you need to leave you to have to first start the engine which takes time then you can board it. It’s simple but so effective. I really like the gameplay loop and setting they have gone with, it’s tense but looting is satisfying. The biggest issue I have with the game is the location is very dense and heavily populated making sight and survivor control very difficult and tedious. Being that the game is slow-paced I’m general, having this makes it a slog, and starting again is never fun even with permanent unlocks because the early permanent unlocks are weapons and the like and you always get better weapons from looting making them redundant. Overall Deadly Days is a good survival game and one that Dead of Winter fans should check out.
