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Nice[A]rgie

Nacho

Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina

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MY RIG

GPU: GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB GDDR6X Trinity

MOBO: MSI MAG Z590 TOMAHAWK WIFI

CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-11700KF

MEMORY: 16GB (2x8GB) 3200 Mhz Corsair Vengance Lpx DDR4

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Review Showcase

Death's Gambit: Afterlife

7.6 Hours played

So, this is a tough one. Death's Gambit is a game that tries too hard to be a Dark Souls, to the extent that it punishes you unceasingly with little to no rewards, while mixing some interesting mechanics that aren't fully exploited.

Pros:

Beautiful pixel art graphics. Enemies and backgrounds design are spectacular.
Varied and lovely OST. Loved the music, probably one the highest points of the game.
Extensive amount of equipment, items and abilities. All of the abilities are tied to specific weapons, which forces you to take your character in a certain direction. So, if you want to use an ability with a greatsword, you have to level up STR accordingly. You have a limit of 3 abilities at a time, and 2 weapons equipped, so it gives you a lot of room to experiment with the combinations. Healing is determined by feathers, that get replenished at rest points and the amount can be increased by finding a certain item. You can also find different types of feathers, which have varying effects, like healing you a greater amount of HP, curing ailments, giving you damage reduction and the like.
Easy and understandable leveling system. There are 7 stats to level up, of which 3 determines the damage of weapon types (Strength, Finesse, and Intelligence) and their respective requisites to use them. The other 4, are tied to your HP, stamina, stamina and ability regeneration and such.
Fairly big map to explore with a nice amount of secrets. Don't expect a gigantic map, but it's big enough to keep you exploring them and finding things for a while. Most secret items are unique and fun to look for.

Cons:

Excessively punishing. Most of the time, you'll find yourself outnumbered and every enemy deals monstrous amount of damage. Pair that with sets of traps, and you are in for a frustrating trip.
Unresponsive controls. Sadly, it fails in one of the most essential things in a 2D metroidvania, the attacking animations doesn't seem to be on pair with the timing of pressing the button, which gets increasingly annoying as times goes by. Same thing may happen with dodging occasionally.
Bad AI. Sometimes, an enemy starts attacking in a pattern, and then runs away from you randomly. Some other times, an enemy starts glitching through walls while running away.
Dumb enemy attack animations. Everytime an enemy starts a combo attack, it will face you, regardless of where he was facing when the combo started. So, if the enemy starts a combo and you dodge to get on the enemy's back, he'll immediately face you mid combo, turning dodging completely meaningless. Also, some attack animations seem to last for a sustained period of time, so even if you dodge in time, when your dodging animation ends, you'll still receive damage.
Glitchy walls and traps. You may encounter glitches that gets you stuck to a wall, or traps like crushing pillars that will glitch you into a wall and make you fall to your death into the nothingness.
Annoying cutscenes. This a personal point, but considering the difficulty of the game you'll find yourself dying a lot, and what you WILL NOT WANT after a frustrating death (often caused by some of the points above), is a stupid cutscene after a random death. I ended up skipping most of them because I just wanted to go get my phoenix feather back as quickly as possible.
Messy inventory. All of your stuff is thrown randomly in your inventory, you can't sort it out, just filter it, which makes it really confusing to find a specific thing when you have a 4-pages inventory.
Bad game design. At a design level, there are some serious flaws with this game. Some areas have random mechanics that are not intuitive at all. For example, red lasers that block your path and you have no idea what triggered it or what are the conditions to deactivate them. Also, while these beams stop you, they don't stop the enemies. So if they decide to run away randomly (as mentioned before), you can't get to them. Also, there are status ailments that may start to build up a bar and you have no clue what they are until it's too late.

To conclude, while this game have it's bad things, it's still playable, and enjoyable to some extent. The only way I can describe the first half of the game is "exhausting", but after you level up a bunch and get a good amount of healing items, the difficulty seems to go down a bit.
Still, I cannot recommend the game at it's current price, but if you can get it at half the price or lower, go for it.

5.5/10