Dead Cells

This is a game people have been recommending for having a fun challenging indie game rogue-like experience. Just by watching the preview of the game made me interested. It definitely requires a controller and a lot of patience. For the first five hours Dead Cells was a learning experience. You will die a lot. People say the game is hard like Dark Souls but interesting like Rogue Legacy. I will have to say that I made a lot of stupid assumptions and mistakes. Let me list some of them.

You will not "level up" your base stats. You can build up your health, weapon damage, or skill in capsules throughout the levels. You can unlock and then build the core damage of those items with kill points. Honestly, leveling anything up over +5% damage is kind of a waste since it requires 50 instead of 10 points. You can find the various blueprints off specific types of enemies. My biggest regret is not paying attention to what you are picking up. Each weapon or skill you pick up will generally increase your core damage and provide additional benefits. There won't be a label or title for these. Instead of saying "Vampire:" etc, you will only get the description of "gain 1% health per strike but receive 150% damage." So don't be surprised if you start summoning "biters" all of a sudden when you pick up that knife off the ground.

Now this game is in early access. The screen shook a lot keeping up with my character and the framerate dropped every now and then. The ending was more or less "thank you for playing" with a reset screen. However, I did have a wonderful 10 hours exploring the different areas. Pretty much each level (including the first) will allow you to continue your adventure in a different area. I will admit that everything got way easier once I carried around 2 turrets. I somehow managed to defeat the mid-way boss and move through to the final boss tossing out those two items every 3 seconds. Oh well. I am glad I got to play this game.

 

7-7-2017