We’ve lined Dead Cells quite a bit over the previous 12 months, and with good motive. It would possibly nonetheless be in Early Access, however even from its early days, it was clearly shaping as much as be one of many slickest, most satisfying platform-roguelikes but, mixing fashionable melee fight with Metroid-esque development.
While builders Motion Twin aren’t fairly able to name it completed, the sixth major update for the game simply rolled out on Steam, including yet another, very dramatic trying surroundings to the sport and a last boss battle to match which have a definite ‘endgame’ really feel to them.
Dead Cells might need began you off in a dingy executioners chamber, dense with decay and ever-living slime, however for the second it ends with an actual sense of grandeur. The Castle zone is a superbly candle-lit expanse crammed with fancy statues, marble pillars and equally ornate guards in gold-trimmed armor. Two new fundamental enemies be part of the roster: A guard with a magic greatsword that may spin to create a twister that’ll draw you nearer, and a spearman who makes use of their weapon’s vary to poke at you on the ground above, though this assault is mercifully properly telegraphed. So far, so Castlevania.
The Hand Of The King is the ultimate boss of the sport, for the second. An enormous beefy armored bloke with an unlimited twin-bladed pole-sword about 3 times so long as you’re tall, and a equally outsized fist that he can slam into the bottom to ship out shockwave assaults. He appears like he means enterprise, and appears a really mano-a-mano battle, slightly than the ‘pound on a big dumb sack of projectile-spraying HP’ type that tends to cap off so many Metroidvania video games.
On prime of the brand new space to discover, new enemies to be murdered by and new boss to cap all the factor off, they’ve launched a number of tweaks and refinements to the sport this replace. While I’ll get to the others in a second, the one that almost all catches my eye is a tweak made to dodging: Evading instantly after an assault and persevering with after you land permits you to resume a combo chain the place you left off. Yep, it’s the good Dodge Offset from Bayonetta. Good to see it featured in different genres now.
Health achieve has been tweaked between the three level-up scroll sorts, which means that Survival makes you essentially the most sturdy, and Brutality offers you the least HP, with Tactics hanging a steadiness, defining the three as excessive/mid/low-risk kinds. There’s additionally a pair new weapon/ability sorts, together with bare-handed melee, which appears very satisfying for combo-fiends.
To make extra room for dessert (the Castle) the portion sizes on the primary course (Fog Fjord, Graveyard, Sepulchre and Ossuary zones) have been decreased, which might be a reduction to some gamers. And should you one way or the other grasp all the above, a brand new problem setting has been launched: Nightmare mode, which the builders insist – in basic Doom vogue – is under no circumstances honest.
Dead Cells is on the market on Steam or through Humble for £17/$20, and Update 6 will keep within the optionally available Beta department for a couple of week earlier than formally going reside.
