Deadlink Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Sometimes a game doesn’t need an engrossing story or compelling main characters. Sometimes, you just want to go from virtual arena to virtual arena and take out enemies with an assortment of weapons, tools and abilities. This is what Deadlink offers. It is a roguelike first-person shooter set in a cyberpunk world where corporations are more powerful than governments, and have the violent means to hold onto that power. You are a brain in a jar that can be transferred to different combat shells, using their skills in a VR setting to test their capabilities against those corpo assets.

From the off, you can see Deadlink has a lot of depth to it. You’ll be repeating runs to earn experience and points, allowing you to unlock new skills and abilities while making progress across levels to unlock the other three ‘shells’ to shove your brain into. The default Soldier shell is not all it’s cracked up to be, and while it suits the first area it is the least fun to use. It comes equipped with a shotgun and rocket launcher, while the abilities include a rappel that can hook onto surfaces and enemies, and a Scrambler that marks and staggers foes. The Hunter shell is more entertaining to use, coming equipped with a Hand Cannon and Arc Cannon, as well as the translocator ability, which swaps your position with a normal enemy as well as marking and stunning them. The next shell is the Decoy which leaves behind a hologram that enemies target while you stay invisible for a bit, but it’s far from being the most fun to use.

That title goes to the Engineer, which comes equipped with a Gauss automatic rifle and a grenade launcher. The Engineer’s deeply enjoyable abilities include being able to deploy a turret, and use a wormlink that can link to enemies marking and incapacitating them. Finally, there’s the Juggernaut, armed with a sawed-off shotgun and a flak cannon, with a Graviton Punch ability which can destroy some enemies in one hit, and Stray Redirector which makes the shell