A masterpiece: Dead Cells

Dead Cells is an action-packed, dungeon-crawling adventure full of danger, thrills and enough enemies to choke a horse, but is it worth all the hype? Today we find out.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, Dead Cells is a rogue-lite Metroidvania game that was released in 2018 on PC and later on console and mobile.

In a rogue-lite game, every time you die you have to go back to the start but importantly, there are some permanent upgrades you can unlock as you progress. This gives you access to more of the map and better weapons and equipment.

One problem that rogue-lites can suffer from is the map getting boring as you go through the same map over and over again. Dead Cells solves this by both the use of procedural generation to make a new map every game and that as you progress you can use new traversal methods to find new biomes that you couldn’t reach before.

This game has been very highly praised by fans and critics alike, having won several awards and having extremely high reviews. After playing over 15 hours of it I have to agree. This game is truly brilliant, expertly juggling both challenging combat and boss-fights, with fun and excitement along the way.

One thing I should note is that this is not an easy game, most players will find it very difficult and frustrating but it’s worth it for the satisfaction of reaching that new stage or finally beating that boss after dozens of attempts. One other area that Dead Cells may lack in a bit is the story, don’t get me wrong there is in fact a well-crafted story here – it just takes some digging to piece it together as a lot of it is told through various ‘lore rooms’ littered around the map which don’t always spawn so many players may never really get a wrap on what’s happening.

In conclusion, Dead Cells is a masterpiece of a game that is definitely worth playing; even if you get a bit frustrated it’s definitely worth it – 9/10.

Matthew M, Year 8