The quality of content is amazing, and when you combine the psychotic storyline with the fluid gameplay and top it off with amazing use of the Unreal engine for graphics and a soundtrack that will drive suspense deep into your soul, Deadlight is easily one of the best Xbox Live Arcade games to come out this summer or arguably this year.
Deadlight, long-awaited highlight of this Summer of Arcade, does not disappoint the fans. Mixing platforming, action and survival in a wise manner, the title conquer all the favors of the public.
For all of its shortcomings, its flaws, and its failures, I still enjoyed my time with Deadlight. I wanted to find out what happened to Randall and his family. I was driven, compelled to finish, and I would still recommend that it be played. Fans of side-scrolling platformers, and zombie games in general, will find an original, if imperfect, experience here. And while the price is a bit steep for the content, I think there's a great game to be found in here.
Part of that fault lies in the game's dialogue. Some of it's rather cheesy, about on the same level as Resident Evil, while other lines just drag out the usual examples of poorly exploited horror. It just doesn't add up in spots.
In Deadlight you play as an ordinary man instead of an indestructible hero, who just wants to survive in a rotten world. It's one of the graphically prettiest games on Xbox Live Arcade to date, but the gameplay unfortunately doesn't reach the same heights and the length of the game is disappointingly short.
It's a game in which an early sense of delight and intrigue soon turns to weariness, the standout scenes and ideas failing to compensate for an increasing sense of deja vu with each new wall run and puzzle, wrapped in a tired storyline that does little to propel you forward. In the end, it's the zombies that make you flee to the conclusion, rather than the design that draws you towards it – a subtle distinction perhaps, but a crucial one.
A beautiful intro does not a great game make, and the full product is a disappointment to say the absolute least. Tequila clearly has a lot of talent and an ability to craft genuinely intimidating, memorable environments -- Deadlight demonstrates the wealth of inventiveness the studio possesses. Yet it feels squandered on lazy design in the second chapter and mistreatment of player trust in the third.