Games review: Dead Effect 2
Over the last ten years, indie titles have become more prominent.
Dead Effect 2 makes the transition from a mobile title to a full-blown console release, and while it may come as a bit of a surprise, it's good. Actually, it's very good.
You start the game choosing one of three characters: the heavy assault guy; the chick with a shotgun; and some close-quarters dude, said to be for the experienced players only.
Dead Effect 2 was created by a team of only 11 people, and at less than £10, it's an impressive feat for any indie game with that background to be fully voice-acted to any standard at all. Accompanying sound is otherwise all of a fairly high standard, weapons sound powerful, the murmur of the zombies is as daunting as having to face them and the music isn't going to be remembered, for either good or bad reasons.
Dead Effect 2 looks good for a small indie title. It doesn't have the development team, budget or aspirations to battle EA or Activision's behemoths. Instead, Dead Effect 2 tries to be a great shooting game, and by merging a late 90s/early 00s style with modern-day techniques, it carries it off pretty well.
Textures are detailed enough, and enemies all feel part of the world, with enough grit and grunge about them to prevent them from seeming unrealistic. There's also a nice range of enemies and effects on show, especially as you delve into the later sections of the game and experience tougher difficulty levels, and a wider range of powers.
Upon choosing Gunnar, when using a pistol there was a helpful radar pop-up which is a Godsend on later levels. Gunnar also saved into a second of three save slots, meaning you can happily swap between characters without losing their progress if you choose to go back to another.
You set off on your quest of finding Danette, and then start on other missions such as waking up Minikin from Cryo-sleep who is an engineer and will then appear back at the base room to upgrade weapons as well as opening a holographic map.
This map is where Dead Effect 2 moves from a pretty standard first-person shooter into realms only truly occupied by the early Deus Ex titles. It would be fair to say the FPS, RPG hybrids have changed somewhat over the years, but this feels true to the roots of the early 00s and the first two Deus Ex games.
You'll need to converse with the characters to find out more about the story and missions, and you'll unlock powers, abilities, weapon upgrades and new implants for your body that help with everything from movement speed to zoom distance. This all adds an impressive depth to proceedings, and you'll soon find yourself turning up the difficulty to obtain slightly better loot.
With the difficulty ramped up, I decided to go for a side-quest of survival on the Nightmare difficulty. I knew I wasn't quite ready for Hell, and after the cake-walk of Medium, I wanted to try something more than Hard. But it's safe to say my plan backfired. I required more firepower to take down enemies, of which there were dozens. It's fair to say, my quest wasn't very successful.
A few missions later, I had another glance at the holographic map, and the initial choice of story missions, generic missions, Survival and Biohazard mode were now joined by even more missions entitled Lone Wolf, as well as an Infestation mode, while at its heart it's another zombie survival mode.
With all these extra side-quests and modes, it's safe to say my play time was easily doubled over the first half of the game, meaning that without any co-operative or multiplayer modes, Dead Effect 2 still does a fantastic job of providing great value for money. It's not suitable for all players, and it's not unusual to see heads flying off, dismembered limbs strewn across the floor, or zombies exploding as your high velocity arrow hits them in the face.
Dead Effect 2 is a very impressive package for £9.59, and while it's not going to fare well beside games costing five times as much, you really can't do much better for this price.
Bottom Line
Dead Effect 2 doesn't try to be a AAA competitor, but what it does try to do, it executes perfectly.
This is a budget shooter, packed with depth and lots of sci-fi zombies to shoot. There are better games available, but not at this price. It is a highly recommended title for retro-modern fans of first-person shooters.
