Neverdead

Alright so I didn't know when to post this so I'll post it up here. I did NOT finish playing through this game BUT, I will tell you all why. Now then, Neverdead.

 When you mention Neverdead to people you are usually met with questions, "Does this mean we can't die in the game?" "What's the health system do?" "Who are you and why are you in my house with that notepad?" It wasn't a very widely known game and apparently, that's how the marketing department wanted it. It was developed by Rebellion Developments and published by Konami so you would think with a Konami backing it would have been at least slightly more on the radar.

In Neverdead, you play as an immortal demon called Bryce who can never die. I'll give you a second to collect your brain fragments if I just blew your mind. From the first moment of the game, he comes off as tired of roaming the earth, apathetic and snarky, very snarky. Think Dante from Devil May Cry turned up to eleven. There is a small interactive cutscene at the beginning which is apparently suppose to tell you a bit about his past but ends up confusing you. Something to do with a fat clown with eight pack abs and a very annoying voice. Fast forward to the present game time. You are introduced to Bryce's sassy and edgy female sidekick Arcadia. She can die. You can not. therein lies the catch to being an immortal killing machine. You need to protect her or you will lose. So after being tethered to your in-your-face sidekick who kicks open the door to your apartment and starts berating you to get to work, you set off to your first assignment.

So in a game where you can't die you're wondering how damage is dealt. Well your body parts can get blown off and you must collect them every time they do unless you have enough regeneration energy reserved to just regrow them. This might have sounded like a good idea on paper, and it is, but after playing for the two or three hours I dedicated to this game, every time my legs or arms got blown off I groaned mournfully and started to begrudgingly look for them. The body part mechanic is different from any other game but the fact that the slightest  hit from an enemy sends your arm or leg flying off across the screen makes the feature seem more like a chore. There are parts of the game that treat you like a pinball that force you to rip your head off and throw it through a vent or a seesaw mechanism to get through a specific part of the level. The problem is the frequency that this happens (It happens about 4 times in two hours) and the camera handle when you're just a head. You misjudge your jump and you have to do the entire bit over again because the camera didn't want to tilt in the right direction.

I need to address this very quickly because it seriously bothered me. Remember somewhere in that word wall up there when I said you couldn't die? Well I lied, I'm sorry. Usually that loss comes in the form of small, white, spiked balls that suck your head and body parts into their stomach when you get blown apart. Your arms or legs aren't too bad since you can just regrow them or kill it with your other arm but they usually go after your head if and when it gets blown off. If they suck you in you have one chance to get free in the form of a quick time event slider and if you fail, you are stuck forever being digested by it as Arcadia put it. They are in EVERY fight. You will not go into a room full of enemies and NOT see four or five of them rolling around. Some say it's for balance, I say it's to annoy the complete hell out of you when you have to do the room over again for the sixth time.

Characters? Alright fine. Bryce and Arcadia are annoying. Plain ans simple. The snap at each other every chance they get and you would think it gets better over time but nope, still annoying after the seventh hundred condescending joke. There is one character which I found way more interesting than Bryce and Arcadia and he's only shown very briefly at the end of the first level. I'll just say he has knives stuck in his body that never run out. Who knows though, maybe Bryce and Arcadia develop a deeper relationship throughout the game.

The guns in this game seem to be made out of cardboard and shoot gum wads because they are useless. There are gun upgrades but even when I added two to my perks list, my guns still didn't do much damage. Your best bet is Bryce's sword which controls with the right thumbstick weirdly enough. You need to flail it around for it to work which I found pretty ass backwards and gave me horrible flashbacks of Too Human's controls.

All things considered, the Neverdead concept sounds great but falls flat on it's face in execution. It needed that over the top feeling to it to make it truly stand out. I feel that if this license were handed to someone like Platinum Games they would make an incredibly kick-ass game. Right now it's a boring hack-and-slash game with a twisty story and a single golden idea. The game isn't bad it was just not very well fleshed out. Maybe my credibility is shot at the beginning where I said I couldn't finish the game but if it didn't grip me and keep me focused enough to push through, there is no point in playing on.