The influx of Souls games that have come in recent years has been a blessing but also a bit of a curse. On the positive side of the equation, you get more Souls games, which is always a plus, and you get some variety due to FromSoft not being the only studio producing games within this sub-genre. The downside has been that, because of the success of FromSoft, many developers simply aim to provide a competent clone of the games in their catalog.
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Well, tha’s not something that can be leveled atDeathbound, a game that places you in a dystopian apocalypse where life, death and eternity are at the forefront of everyone’s mind. This game sets itself apart with a spirit-based combat system where you can switch between pre-set classes on the fly, but is this big swing enough to makeDeathbounda game bound for success?
An Unfortunate Death Rattle
It’s considered a bit of a faux pas to pass judgment on the performance of games on release day, mainly because the developer usually rushes a patch out days after, and you’re left with an egg on your face. But, with that being said, we can’t sit here and say thatDeathboundis a game that plays particularly well from a performance point of view and it’s unlikely a quick patch will fix this up from what we’ve seen.
Despite running this game on a PC rig that is more than capable of running a game such as this, this game stuttered, crashed and dropped frames enough times to make it more than a little irritant you roll your eyes at. And when we tried this game out on the Steam Deck for kicks, this only exasperated the problem. So take this game’s ‘Steam Deck Certified’ label with a pinch of salt. If this game pushed the boundaries of modern graphics, maybe we could have looked past it, but it isn’t a looker. It’s not ugly, don’t get us wrong, but the animations are clunky at the best of times, the environments are all cookie cutter and the general quality of textures and visuals feel about a generation behind. So, it’s hard to see why this game runs so poorly.
Then, to add fuel to this fire, the game has so many little wonky details that only further drag the overall presentation down, such as the fact that character dialogues will play over the top of each other or the fact that a boss theme will continually play for fifteen minutes after you defeat the boss. This lack of polish and detail constantly pulls you out of the experience, which is a shame because the story the game tries to tell is not half bad.
Matters of Life and Death
After a barrage of negatives, we can finally say something positive here.Deathboundhas a rather interesting story. This game sees you begin proceedings as Therone, representative of the Church of Death. But over the course of your adventure, you’ll acquire the spirits of different lost souls from the world you inhabit, each representing a different group or faction within this torn and twisted dystopian world.
This eventually leads to you getting to know six different people, each with an important piece of the puzzle, allowing you to understand the lay of the land in this ruined world, and there are moments where this split-personality approach pays off, such as the introduction sequences for each character that works through their backstory, as well as some of the interactions between the characters when they are butting heads while trapped in the same mortal shell. It’s not all sunshine and roses here either, though.
As we mentioned in our preview, there was a worry that the characters would be nothing more than caricatures representing shallow stereotypes, and sadly, that’s more or less what they end up being. This seems intentional as the developer aims to make crystal clear who likes and dislikes each other for the synergy system to work. But equally, you need to give the player a little bit of credit, as it feels a little diluted down to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And you know what they say, if your game is for everyone, it’s for no one.
Not to mention, the vocal performances are laughably bad at times, which do nothing to endear you to the rather one-note characters you play. But the scariest thing is that, despite the story having as many highs as it does lows in terms of quality, this is actually the best thing about the game.
The Essence of A Souls-Like
It’s fair to say that having excellent visuals and a killer story are considered a bit of a bonus where Souls games are concerned, as by and large, players are there for the harsh but fair gameplay. Unfortunately, you’ll find nothing of the sort when playingDeathbound. This game feels like the equivalent of drawing a painting from memory. All the key features are there, more or less, but all the finer details that make a Souls game stand out from the crowd are missing in action.
The most prominent feature ofDeathboundis undoubtedly its spirit-based combat system, which allows you to control six pre-set characters. This, in theory, is a great idea, as this forces the player to engage with all the playstyles a Souls game can accommodate rather than min-maxing just one. Not to mention, being able to switch to another on the fly opens up so many tactical possibilities.
In practice, however, this system is deeply flawed and a pain to engage with. Our pain points with the gameplay read like a laundry list, but we’ll give you the highlights. Firstly, having played the vast majority of this game, it dawned on us that we still didn’t quite know how the health system worked, and this is because it’s not your typical Estus Flask system, but instead a shared pool of health awkwardly split between 4 active characters.
This means that when you heal, you take from one to give to another, or alternatively, you take the cumulative HP and distribute it equally. Perhaps this was the product of the development team working themselves into a corner and not knowing a good way to handle the HP of four unique playable characters at once. But it begs the question, why not just have typical HP replenishment items rather than making the whole thing so convoluted?
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This would have been a small issue had the combat felt so fluid that you could get good enough to not need healing items at all, but that’s simply not an option here. Having played and beaten almost all Soulsborne games out there, this is not a skill issue, this is a game issue. The game simply isn’t polished enough to provide a fair, challenging environment for players to improve and excel.
The switch and synergy systems allow you to perform special attacks, and these become crucial as you near the end game, but the switching takes an eternity and usually leads to you being smacked around because of the delay. Then you have the environment that will see you get pinned into a corner or stuck on a piece of debris, and you’ll effectively be stun-locked in place because your stamina pool is pitiful, rendering blocks near useless and dodges at a premium.
And then, to top it all off, you have the enemies and bosses themselves, which all work well individually, but when multiple are introduced at once, it becomes near-impossible to navigate each stage without getting overwhelmed, showcasing the lack of balance and the shoddiness of the tools given to the player to navigate each stage of the game.
In short, it all feels a little ham-fisted, and even if you’re someone who is a veteran of games like this, we can say with some confidence that you will inevitably give up on working meticulously through levels, battling enemies as they come, and begin running from checkpoint to checkpoint with no attempt to engage with the game’s combat at all. Because if you do, you’ll just be punished for things outside your control.
Toward the end of the game, the developer then decides to design a boss, which is essentially a set of enemy waves one after another, along with aggressive environmental hazards chucked in there for good measure. And, for us, this was the defining moment when playing this game, showcasing everything wrong withDeathboundas a Souls-like in a microcosm. It has the essence of a Souls-like but lacks all the charm, polish, and mechanical nuance that makes a Souls-like competent.
Closing Comments:
Deathboundis a game that has a lot of great ideas that seem amazing on paper, but few of them actually end up hitting the mark. The clear high points of this game pretty much all relate to the setting, the story, and the characters presented, but even this is marred by the goofy vocal performances and the frequency of the swearing in a bid to seem edgy and cool. But in the end, the game is dragged down by a wonky multi-character combat system, a messy health system, an all-round unresponsiveness, which is a death warrant in a Souls-like such as this, and the fact that the game’s performance is enough to make you throw in the towel before you even have a good reason to write the game off. It feels like a game that would have benefited from pivoting to an all-out hack-and-slash format because, despite labeling itself as one,Deathboundsimply doesn’t have the polish or the attention to detail needed to truly call itself a Souls game.
Deathbound
Version Reviewed: PC
Deathbound is a party-focused Souls-like set in the dystopian world of Ziêminal, where science and faith are permanently at odds. Only through battling with perfect synergy between your bound characters will you be able to defeat the brutal monsters and discover the fate of Soulon, leader of the Essencemancers.
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