This game is what i was expecting from Doom Eternal's horde mode.

Played GUNFIRE REBORN and beat the game few times with different characters but gunplay felt weak and didn't care for it so much afterwards. ROBOQUEST had better gunplay but it was way too long for what it was to finish a run and having no save system made me quit that even faster. Deadlink on the other hand ticks these two boxes flawlessly.

Faster mobility than Doom Eternal which can cause some problems at the beginning for some people but having only 5 equipment which consist of 2 guns, 2 abilities and 1 grenade for each character/class makes it up for it in a way that you don't need to memorize so many keys and can go between these equipments fairly easily. Which will give you easier time to master the mobility.

Like Doom Eternal you can get armor from enemies you kill and you do that by marking your enemies and killing marked enemies before it expires. Grenades that damages enemies marks them for example and almost all abilities of characters also does the same thing. There are no HP recovery by killing enemies though, you only recover HP by purchasing HP from stores or by completing special rooms. Sometimes with perks. But since you can get armor from enemies way more faster and way too easily compared to Doom Eternal, you are not gonna look for HP recovery all that much, thanks to the marking system and how quick and easy you can mark enemies.

GAMEPLAY LOOP consist of you entering a room, engaging in combat in arena shooter style with very high mobility for almost all characters which can be even improved further with perks, clearing out the room and then choosing the next room. Before choosing the next room you get to see which type of rewards are you gonna get. Like how it works in HADES basically. You get perks and upgrades for your equipments after completing a room. You do this number of times and eventually enter the boss room, defeat it, and you go to the next stage where there are new enemy types in a new biome if you will. There were 3 stages in early access, now they added the 4th and final one. They also added a new character, making a total of 4 characters to choose.

All your characters have 2 weapons. One standart weapon like shotgun for soldier and one special weapon which is rocket launcher for soldier for example. Standart weapons have unlimited ammo, you just reload when magazine is empty, whereas special weapons require you to collect their ammunition in the room if there are any, or by killing enemies which they may drop it or the best and most consistent way, by breaking C-balls. C-balls are energy balls that you can find in every room and you can break them by punching them or with your certain abilities. By breaking them you do get ammo for your secondary weapon.

You have perk slots for your characters, 4 of them. Weapon switching, using ability 1, using ability 2 and breaking C-balls.

For example soldier has a hook ability that works pretty much like super shotgun's meat hook, you fly towards that enemy and do your thing afterwards. Now if you equip a perk to your hook ability slot that says "Stun enemies that are marked (active) and deal %50 increased damage to marked enemies (passive)" it means you will stun an enemy because hook ability marks an enemy and you will deal %50 increased damage to all enemies whether you used your meat hook on them or not as long as they are marked. Active part of the perk only works when you do that action you assigned it to like using abilities or breaking C-balls. This itself creates fun and interesting builds for your character.

Soundtrack is good, it is adrenaline pumping, goes along with the gameplay itself.

I recommend this to people who craves for a good FPS roguelike because at the moment, at least for me, this is the best.

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As a sidenote, the game feels at its best when you play it on higher difficulties, highest one to be exact. After getting used to playing at least 50+ runs on hardest difficulty, i chose a different character and started a run with the easiest difficulty by mistake but didn't notice it, and when the game started i thought game was bugged and not spawning enough enemies as it should. Realized later on that i was on easier difficulty. Funny side is that i was not even able to progress through first stage at the easiest difficulty when i first started playing the game but when i got used to the gameplay loop and combat, i was beating the highest difficulty with fresh save and no meta progression whatsoever. It was surely hard to achieve but it was doable. You may feel the difficulty spike at higher ones at first but once you get used to it and learn to use your mobility to your advantage, it will feel like a good and doable challenge.

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[EDIT]

Now i needed to do this because it still blews my mind how there are other roguelike FPS games that are doing better than this game, player count wise. Not that i care about the concurrent player base given that this is a single player video game but it feels like this game deserves way more attention than it got. And there are few people i saw were complaining about how difficult the game is. Because of this i wanted to talk about few more things regarding this game. Because this game is not unnecessarily hard, it is just challenging, you just have to know what type of FPS roguelike this game is. And how mobility is way more important than your combat abilities.

This is NOT Gunfire Reborn where getting few key items/weapons that you are comfortable with or having alot of meta progression makes you win the game. This game is Doom Eternal on steroids in a roguelike gameplay environment. While how this sounds may scare some people given that there were some who didn't like how Doom Eternal gameplay turned out to be, this game is actually way more managable than Doom Eternal.

In Doom Eternal you have 9 weapons. That's 9 keybinds already. There is also a button for switching between weapon's mods. That makes it 10 buttons. A grenade button and grenade switching button, which makes it 12. Chainsaw, flamethrower and punch adds up to 15 buttons. And the last one your sword or warhammer if you are playing the expansions which makes 16 buttons. And of course, dashing. 17 freaking buttons you need to go back and forth when you are dealing with your enemies which if you've played Doom Eternal on higher difficulties, you know as well as i do, you needed almost all of them.

Now if we were to check Deadlink, your characters only have 2 weapons, a grenade, 2 abilities, dash. And that's it. All of that adds up to 6 buttons you need to manage. 5, if you just use your scroll button to switch between weapons.

This is why this game is way more managable than Doom Eternal. Like in that game, you also need to switch your weapons constantly in here too but switching between just 2 weapons is alot more managable and you don't even need to press 1 or 2 by the way, you can just use your scroll button on your mouse since it is only 2 weapons. Since there aren't so many buttons you need to memorize and go back and forth, you will have easier time to learn combat controls. This will leave you to adjust how to manipulate mobility in this game because compared to Doom Eternal, this game is way more faster in a way that how your enemies come at you, how they fire at you etc. After unlocking few meta progression stuff, plus getting good at how to move, normal difficulty of the game will feel like a joke.

Just keep at it, practice your mobility, use C-balls to your advantage. If you think you are still having a hard time, go with soldier! That character has the best mobility in the game than any other character which if you master it, highest difficulty of the game will feel like walk in the park.