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Deadfall Adventures Review
Deadfall Adventures isn't a completely awful videogame, but it's so nondescript and dull that you have to wonder why it ever got made. Initially it seems to be a (very) low rent Uncharted rip-off, and in terms of its plot and characters, that's precisely what it is. But it's a third-person shooter rather than a first-person one and riddled with some of the most rudimentary puzzles ever devised. This wouldn't cut the mustard as a cheap Xbox Live Arcade outing, so why it's only available on disc, and for a recommended retail price of £40, is anyone's guess.
The game starts with a voiceover, a panning shot of a treasure map and a gun on a table, and music that sounds like the Uncharted themes but without the class or production values. Your hero James Lee Quartermain is a completely unlikeable lunkheaded fool of a man, and (of course) a relative of Alan Quartermain. The cast is rounded out by a fat shlub who isn't to be trusted (or is he?) and a beautiful red-headed lady who looks and sounds like Lara Croft. After this ragtag bunch of bores are introduced, it's onto a rolling load of combat, puzzles (i.e.: button pressing) combat, and more button pressing. Followed by some more combat and button pressing.
From the get-go, the Xbox 360 version of the game just feels wrong, and the jerky movement makes you feel like you're playing as a character with elastic bands tied around his ankles. There are bugs galore: checkpoints needed to be reloaded more than once when an enemy became inexplicably invincible, and you're constantly encouraged to pick up weapons that have no ammo in them, which is fantastically annoying when you're in the middle of a gunfight.
One supposedly dramatic cutscene ends with a temple collapsing, and when you're thrown back into the gameplay, the rubble has stopped falling and the temple is dead quiet, despite the fact that falling masonry is supposed to have killed one of the bad guys. Deadfall Adventures is filled with inconsistencies like this, and along with visuals that make it look like a PS2 game - literally - again you are left with too many questions to ask. How did this ever get made? And (more pressingly) how did it ever get released?
Despite ripping off some of the most ripped-off games of current years, Deadfall Adventures does steal one interesting thing - the combat from Alan Wake. Using a torch to weaken zombies before blowing them away with a firearm is still a brilliantly entertaining system, and it's strange that it hasn't been pinched more often than it has. It seems weird to praise a game for ripping off something original for a change, but then this is that kind of game. It's hard to come up with too many kind words.
Amazingly there's multiplayer, but you'll never get to sample it. In fact, it might not even exist. Because you can't join active games you're forced to spend all of your time sitting in lobbies, and because you can't select quick match you're forced to pick one of the eleven - eleven! - different game modes and hope that everyone else plumps for the same one. It's insanity. Even if this becomes your favourite game of all time, in all probability you'll never, ever get to play it in multi. It's almost as if its creators didn't want people to see it…
An early caption in the game reads like this: "Deadfall Adventures is all about exploration, and you should look in every crevice, every nook and cranny, to find treasure". What this is pointing out is that the game is so poorly paced and poorly designed that you're forced to look around these dull worlds to find treasure, in the belief that this is more game for your money. It isn't. There's a skill-tree and an upgrade system, but they're so simplistic and barely make a difference to your character anyway, that they're barely worth a mention.
This would be a non-starter as a launch title for a new system, but as a game that's arriving at the back end of a generation at a time when everyone is getting feverishly excited about the new one? Don't even bother.
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3/10
Review By Chet Roivas
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