

Beyond the main game and its copious unlocks, the developers have been adding different ways to have fun.įor those who want to show off – or perhaps just need to catch a bus – Dead Cells is built from the ground up for speedrunning. There are new biomes and bosses waiting for you as you get further and further into the island, but it doesn’t stop there. It’s also a game that has a surprising amount to do.
DEAD CELLS SPEEDRUN SERIES
Perhaps you’re more comfortable with the Balanced Blade’s moveset, but that slower Oiled Sword might couple nicely with the Fire Grenade you just picked up? Every level has a series of interesting decisions for you to make while the clock is still ticking. It satisfies cravings for both action and strategy in each playthrough. Players will balance weapon moveset familiarity with stats and synergies, each respawn an opportunity for ad-hoc theorycrafting. On top of this, all gear will come with randomised modifiers, which will be music to any Diablo fan’s ears. They also have different timings, such as a slightly longer attack animation on the Twin Daggers’ third strike. You may have noticed each of these has a nugget of risk/reward baked in. The Twin Daggers crit on the third hit in their combo, and the Whip only crits on targets at the maximum thwack range. Or the War Spear, which crits if it hits two enemies at the same time. Take the Rapier for example, which crits after dodge rolls. It’s a unique system that gives each weapon an interesting playstyle and individual flavour. Based on the “Souls roll,” hitting the dodge button here will grant you a second of invulnerability.Įach weapon has its own moveset but importantly, these carry different conditions for critical attacks as well. We’re still playing this game a year after its Early Access launch, and that simply wouldn’t be the case if it didn’t rest on a rock solid combat system. Every time we look at the island it seems different.

Why? Because timed rewards are waiting for those who go from slow to flow. In Dead Cells, the latter becomes from beating each area quickly, as opposed to just beating them. Whether you’re exploring the new, or dominating the old, it’s just a different kind of fun. It’s easy to lose yourself in that Soulslike flow when you’ve mastered an area and spend hours cutting through its enemies like so much butter. Even going through areas we’ve beaten hundreds of times before, we didn’t get bored of them. Find the shortcut, and these abilities effectively effectively let you skip a few biomes.Īll of that spells more variety - though hell, even the repetition is fun in this game. Once you’ve obtained the ability to climb vines, or use statues to teleport, or even wall climb, these permanent skills let you access the previously inaccessible. When you arrive at The Ramparts – a section of rooftops and towers patrolled by archers and mages – it’ll always be a lower level area with appropriately scaled gear.Īs you’d expect from a roguelike, players have a degree of control over which biomes they visit. The content within each is randomised every playthrough, but there are reliable constants. From The Sewers, to the Black Bridge, to the Clock Tower, these areas all have their own tilesets and enemies. The Random Worlds of Dead Cellsĭead Cells achieves this by splitting everything up into different biomes. The solution, like most of what Dead Cells offers, fees like a greatest hits of other games that’s somehow evolved into its own unique thing. Still - seems like a contradiction, doesn’t it? How can a roguelite with randomly generated levels also be a metroidvania, a genre known for its meticulously crafted and explorable worlds? It turns out people just can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet, Soulsy combat. Video games, eh? It’s a subgenre of a sub-sub-subgenre that actually manages to define more than a few other games on the horizon.


DEAD CELLS SPEEDRUN PC
Dead Cells is the latest 2D pixel art metroidvania Soulslike roguelite action platformer to hit PC and console. Take a deep breath, because we’re about to say the name of the genre. Marrying gorgeous pixel art with skill-based combat and cleverly randomised levels, this is a dangerously replayable action game that you can gorge on in long stretches or just in 20 exhilarating minutes before work. While many games today seem to release and then (hopefully) get fixed later, Dead Cells has been functional and fun for so long that it’s almost as if developer Motion Twin forgot to hit the release button.
