Death’s Gambit is free on Epic

Monday, no news but you can go check out the two reviews of The Crush House and Vampire Therapist. Tuesday, there is a demo for Mystopia out now, and there will be a beta test for a new free-to-play Dragon Ball MOBA. Wednesday, Shadows of Doubt is heading to its 1.0 release and will be coming to consoles, the Debtors’ Club got a release date late in the game, and REKA is set for early access next month. Thursday, and it was a day with a Y in it, so of course a new extraction shooter got shown off. I agree with the old lady.

Moving on to the Epic Games Store and the free-to-play guff passing as “this is worth $25.” Good for you World of Warships, now if only you had meaningful gameplay to back that up. The “selling point,” as far as I’ve known it, is the “look at the pretty, detailed ships” and not the digital game of Battleships without the exciting swearing at the family bit, seeing how far you can go before being tossed out. Given the fact I don’t get stiff at the sight of battleship grey, the “Starter Pack: Albany” features scrap metal sold in 1990 and a whole lot of currencies you’ll burn through in 5 minutes.

In fact, before I move on here in a second, I also saw a couple of trailers that featured the maturity rating for World of Warships. Other than old men who are really boring, touching themselves to the 40mm guns, what part of World of Warships features “sex?” Or is it a warning that if you ever play it meaningfully you’ll never get any? “Captain, we’ve achieved penetration!” no you haven’t.

Speaking of penetration, the reason White Rabbit’s Death’s Gambit: Afterlife never really took off half as well to the point you knew about it upon release is that it was released in August of 2018. That itself isn’t particularly special, but given its developers made a wicker man of Hidetaka Miyazaki and burned themselves inside while a band played Michiru Yamane’s soundtrack to Symphony of the Night, that is important. So it wears the skin of Dark Souls and hums the tune of Castlevania, what’s so special about that? Dead Cells was released 7 days prior and didn’t have UI cribbed from FromSoft.

Death’s Gambit isn’t bad, but it isn’t particularly special either. It is reliable with a story of making a deal with death, and blah blah blah, you’ve heard it all before. Mechanically it is Dark Souls, visually it wants to take some notes of Castlevania. It hums a similar tune, and does all the things you think it does from those descriptions, but it also has conflicts.

We see it a lot now, stamina bars because they were in Dark-Elden-Borne and every other game from here to Timbuktu. The emphasis is to be slow and methodical, but realistically you still need to be quick and nimble to avoid attacks. That is something Death’s Gambit forgets, eating stamina like I eat cake. If you like your Salt and Sacrifices or other 2D variations of copying FromSoft’s homework, then you’ll love Death’s Gambit: Afterlife, but if you’re more Hollow Knight and the likes, it might get annoying.

All this week you can pick up Death’s Gambit: Afterlife and the “Starter Pack: Albany” for World of Warships on the Epic Games Store until Thursday, the 22nd of August. Moving on to next week it is a double bill of games that makes me think of other games. Released only in April, Abstraction Games’ 5-on-5 MOBA (Gigantic: Rampage Edition) version of the 2017 free-to-play shooter, Gigantic, looked nice in trailers back in the E3 days. Too bad it is a MOBA that is being shilled on Epic four months later. The other is The Callisto Protocol, which I confuse for Returnal all the time.