After playing Deadfall Adventures, I’ve got some advice for indie developers, or any studio otherwise working with a small budget: work within your constraints, not someone else’s. I’m sure most folks for whom that would be relevant or useful have already figured that out, but somebody at The Farm 51 didn’t.
Deafall Adventures is, through and through, a knock-off of Uncharted. In some ways it gets that right. It certainly does have really awesome textures, for one thing. If you were looking at screenshots of this title you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for something more awesome than it really is because it does look pretty.
It also understands the value of puzzles, and that there are people who would like to play these sorts of games — see: old Tomb Raider fans — without having to deal with tons of intense combat like we see with Uncharted. Thus, there are more puzzles than I’d have expected, and you can actually set the difficulty of the combat and the puzzles separately. (Puzzle difficulty here refers to whether or not your AI partners will scream instructions at you over and over again like you’re an idiot, which I guess is an impression you court when you say you want easy puzzles.)
Beyond that, however, Deadfall Adventures pretty much gets everything else wrong. For one, the shooting itself is a rather unpleasant experience on normal difficulty, and that badness is only exacerbated by the comical placement of checkpoints that feels like it’s some sort of joke or commentary in itself. Combat situations are clearly delineated from each other in that you aren’t having running gunfights from room to room.
So when I battled in an area inside an old Egyptian tomb in which I had to stand on three stone buttons, exposed as can be, while fighting Nazis and waiting for this door to open all the way before running out and riding a zipeline a long way, I took for granted typical checkpoint wisdom. But in the next area I fought a couple dudes in metal armor who could only be killed by a tank buster weapon I didn’t even know was there and died, you can imagine the sorts of heinous sounds that came from my mouth when I discovered I’d have to do the button fight again.
And you can’t manually save, either.
OK, so the shooting isn’t fun at all, but I can deal with that if the presentation is good enough. Unfortunately, the presentation is not good. For one, our lead Mr. Quatermain — yes, he is the grandson of freaking Allan Quatermain — has many clever and snarky lines to deliver (the writing is pretty on point, actually), and through every single one of them he just sounds like a mouthbreather. The actor is not so good in general, sure, but the kicker is that he has no idea how to sound cool or funny. So when refers to his partner Jen’s “well-shaped ass” his tone and cadence don’t allow for anything but an “ewwwww” reaction out of me.
For the 1,473rd time I ask: how difficult is it to hire a decent voice actor or two in the year 2013? Or even find somebody on the dev team who can read a line the way a real human speaks normally? It shouldn’t be that hard, and you’d think such a thing would be a priority for a team building an Uncharted rip-off.
Adding insult to mortal injury, Deadfall Adventures insists on riffing on both Uncharted and Indiana Jones. The main theme is so clearly “inspired by” Uncharted it’s downright depressing, and whoever thought it would be funny to have Quatermain sarcastically remark that something “belongs in a museum” very much needs to stop straying outside his or her job description.
And then there’s the perfectly OK character animations and blank faces. I like Mars: War Logs and Of Orcs and Men, so I have little business whining about animation deficiencies, but Deadfall brought it on itself by reminding me of Uncharted constantly. When playing this game with Uncharted on the brain, the appeal of performance capture makes sense. The character faces pretty much don’t move, and body movements just seem off — again, the latter is only an issue because it was seemingly begging me to compare it with Uncharted.
One top of it all is an interesting story about an advanced civilization on Earth pre-humanity; sure, we’ve had plenty of those, but I still like all of them. Mysterious ancient forebears are almost always cool, even in something like Halo 4 where I can’t even follow the plot. I was able to follow the plot here. Thank goodness for small favors.
Deadfall Adventures also has multiplayer stuff. I’ll remind you again though that this game has bad combat, and there’s really no reason to discuss multiplayer any further because of that.
Flying Wild Hog, working on a sub-$1 million budget on Shadow Warrior, made a game that was enjoyable, looked very nice and featured good acting. You could definitely see that game’s budgetary constraints, but they weren’t all up in your face at every turn.
Deadfall Adventures, meanwhile, is just a high-resolution facade that once knocked over reveals exactly what The Farm 51 didn’t have to work with instead of showing they can excel within their financial limitations.
Final Verdict
4 out of 10
A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
