Deathgarden sets the stage for a potentially long lasting, action packed experience.
(First Impressions)
Platforms: PC (Steam)
Publisher: Behaviour Interactive
Developer: Behaviour Interactive
Release Date: TBA
The Deathgarden closed alpha was pretty epic. I was beyond thankful to receive a code from their senior producer and I streamed it for about fourteen hours last week. It was a great time. I will be going deep into details about the state of the alpha version that was released this past week and how my time was with it. We must remember though that this is what we were left to interpret. An alpha. A closed alpha with a slow incline of players over the time it was up. A secondary branch of Behaviour Interactive is creating Deathgarden, the same developers of Dead by Daylight. This team managed to retain the same concept of one mega power house hooking up victims while giving it a complete twist. The game-play is insanely rich in Deathgarden, for both sides. Hunter and Runner come up with so many challenges and have plenty of options to tackle them as you frantically adapt to your opposition. It is quite impressive and with fourteen hours dug into this alpha, seven for both sides, I feel confident in this statement. With all this complexity however, it fails to grasp player understanding to a point where it can almost be unwinnable… specifically for Runners. Hunter has options but is the obvious power buff of this game and with five Runners, all of them should know what they are doing or else things go downhill really quick. So let’s start from the beginning, get some core concepts in for both sides and explain why this will be an issue if this is not addressed in the next build or even full release.
A band of Runners brace for the Hunter's wrath; Stunning him in place with the "Control" class.
Starting with Runner’s, they play the entire game in third person and start matches in an overhead base then jump down in the randomly generated arena. They have some time to choose their load-outs and any perks they want to bring into the match. Perks do miscellaneous things like boost damage reduction while rolling, revive allies quicker, things like that. For Runner’s so far, their perks are incredibly helpful . Then there are the classes: Support, Tormentor and Control. The support class aids in shielding and healing allies from afar. Tormentor, by far the most enticing class in my opinion, provides visual status on the Hunters position if tagged and slows down his action speed if in the area of effect casted. Then the control class is the pain in the butt character who will slow down and stun the Hunter. And I can tell you from experience, it sucks. After the Runner’s choose their load-outs, they may prepare to drop into the dome and then start the game. Then once they are in, they need to build up NPI and capture objectives. Objectives are quite clear with A, B, and C on the top of screen... but no idea what that relates to. Wander around enough, and you will find these pylons with one of the three letters on it. These are the capture points. They take a large amount of time to capture if alone but will capture quicker with other teammates. Straightforward right? Not until the Hunter is notified. I will explain what he does later in this situation. Once at least two out of three objectives are fully captured, the exits become available and at least three runners need to escape for the match to be a victory. If more than three runners die, the Hunters win. This is what Runner’s piece together on their first few matches. At least from what I gathered on my first playthroughs. I did not even get my class ability until my third match. So after a handful of matches, I spent a while trying to learn more about what is in my kit instead of getting my body painted all over the landscape (I lost every match until I started to experiment with the game features).
So besides objectives, there will be other resources on the map. There are ammo crates, blue upgrade boxes, blue upgrade stations and healing stations which can give you health back should you lose a bar or two of your max health. It can also have you revive you if you get downed and manage to crawl to an active health crate. If the Runner tags any of these resources, including objectives, they will gain NPI. I do not know what the acronym even means but a bar at the bottom of the screen will fill up. It fills when you play the objectives, tag resources and aid your teammates in game-play situations. This bar will allow you to use your class abilities. Which you get from collecting parts from the blue boxes. Which you bring to the blue upgrade stations on this map. Do you peeps start to see the problem in my explanation here? This is a handful of information to absorb and the game does not abbreviate any of this. At all. Saying it out loud makes sense but when you have large objectives, a quiet UI of player interaction and a giant gun nut Hunter on your tail, it does not leave you with a proper level of understanding or comprehension. Their desperately needs to be more explanation for the Runner meta so that players can piece two and two together away from the stressful game-play. I am not sure if Behaviour wants to reward the players for curiosity or figuring things out on their own but this game has too many miscellaneous layers to do that I feel. And respectfully, these miscellaneous layers are actually extremely well thought out but are not being made apparent to either side. Literally, everyday I played this alpha, I learned something completely new and it was both exciting but frustrating to know there was an extra advantage I was not aware of. It is a competitive game and every edge should be made clear for the particular class you are playing. The game is too fast paced to constantly question what things are happening over time. I know this is just an alpha but we cannot disregard that this can be a potential fear and issue for upcoming players. Especially with those of varying skill levels.
The Hunter, braced with deployable turrets and a deadly auto rifle.
With a large chunk of the Runner’s explained alongside some of the world elements, Hunter should be a piece of cake to explain. The Hunter plays in first person and offers a completely different perspective on the game's formula. The main goal of the Hunter is to kill at least three of the five Runners before they manage to escape the map. To do so, the Hunter comes equipped with a general stamina power, gadget and two weapons. The Hunter also get’s perks but mostly revolve around keeping his weapons stocked, reloading faster and being aware of world resources more easily. For this alpha, there is one stamina power which allows the Hunter to leap massive heights and sprint twice as fast. It honestly was one of the most empowering factors in his kit and it gave me such a great impression on my first match. Then there are his gadgets which for this alpha are auto turrets or landmines. Both equally good with their own benefits. I found myself using the landmines way more since it occupied Runner time much more than the easily spottable turrets and caught a lot of Runners off guard when the landscape would be littered in them. Lastly, the weapons available are a shotgun, auto rifle and sniper rifle. All amazing weapons with benefits in many perspectives. The shotgun is obviously very effective at close range and really secures kill when you manage to get the shock stuns off, which is the Hunter’s basic area of effect melee button. The auto rifle is great from mid to long range and can really pick off Runners during the chase if they manage to close some distance. Then there is the sniper rifle which can prevent a chase from even happening. It is the most powerful primary with great accuracy, damage and kill secures. If you manage to excel in long range first person action, I would advise the sniper rifle. I have seen this weapon end games in less than a few minutes than anything else of the arsenal. Personally, I am trash with any sniper rifle so I am not blessed with such power.
With outfitted kits out of the way, game-play and objectives come up. Again, three Runners need to die. For the Hunter to kill, he either needs to let Runners bleed out after they are downed by his ferocity or executed and immediately removed from the match. This is where the Bloodpost comes into play. The Bloodpost is activated after a Runner gets downed. After two more Runner’s get downed, the Bloodpost is fully functional and a Runner may be sent to this objective. After being sent to the Bloodpost, a timer commences allowing both sides to plan how to handle the incoming Runner’s life. If no Runner intercepts this objective, the Hunter performs a set action and can kill that Runner. Saved or executed, the Bloodpost is then reset and the next downed state will start filling the Bloodpost again. This is the primary method of player removal for the Hunter. Besides that, the Hunter wants to patrol the map, hunt Runners and make sure the objective pylons for the Runner’s stay off. There are extra features the Hunter gets like shooting resources to trigger tracking abilities and getting double Bloodpost fills when downing survivors off the edge of the map. It possess more options to consider while initiating and planning chases.
A Runner capturing an objective pylon and earning NPI for assisting the primary goal.
This is the core game-play of Deathgarden and with all these extra features for both sides, the intricacy of this game goes fairly far. It truly left a great impression with me. The maps could use some more work in their generation. The randomness adds a great factor but the overarching landscapes become noticeably repetitive and almost unsettlingly unbalanced in some cases. All against the Hunter in my opinion. The landscape height, structure spawning and resource pools all go against the Hunter as Runner’s can quickly stock up, loop the Hunter and force him to exhaust his resources on tall landscapes and some building structures make for another good looping spot for Runner’s. Though a skilled Hunter can make the most of these situations. Tagging resources with his bullets and denying the pool of assets or wisely using gadgets to prevent annoying height locked loops, it does not stop the fact that the Hunter is dealing with the same cons as Runners except he needs to put more work in around this landscape during chases. Runner’s have no idea where anything is… and that is it. Which can be a challenge on it’s own when it comes to objective discovery however, the landscape is usually in their favor. I think a more truly random algorithm of landscape generation and spread of resources will make for good play on both sides especially since the starting zones are random as well. It will also take a lot of the current predictability out as well. Whenever I see items closely bunched together or two of the same building structures close to each other, it feels more awkward than random.
Before getting into my closing statement, there needs to be one quick mention to the balance of this game. As mentioned prior, the Hunter can get some unlucky map spawns but they are a true force to be reckoned with. When I played as the Hunter, I felt as though my magazine clips and ammo capacity were a bit too high on the primary weapons. Not even a few blasts of the clip can down a Runner and I had such an excess every-time I scored a down. Ammo crates were also not a priority of mine to gather as well since I never seemed to run out of ammo in the first place. Maybe some number adjustments can create a quick objective to actually make every shot count rather than spraying a whole clip as you inch the Runner's down slowly or brutally quick. As for Runner's, completely under-powered without knowledge yet a complete force to be reckoned with on proper communication and game-play awareness. These tutorials I keep mentioning are super important so that the game can be played a bit more properly and see some more coordinated Runner play so that they can be nerfed properly because they definitely already need it. I have seen some crazy domination with knowledgeable Runner's even against skilled Hunters. I do enjoy the ability to not overstack status affects once they are applied to the Hunter but the coordination is both rewarding yet almost unmanageable in certain circumstances. I believe there will be proper playtests to observe this more.
Snuffy's Closing Statement:
Two action packed genres combine into an amazing asymmetrical lovechild.
In a whole, this is what I gathered from the Deathgarden Alpha: A greater glimpse into it’s true game-play potential, an understanding of the resources presented and the potential of this title in the near future. It’s presentation is strongly suited in it’s game-play presentation and edgy Runners. I truly enjoyed this game and am thankful for the codes I received during the duration of this alpha period. I do hope my biggest gripe of the difficulty skill curves are taken into consideration as the project moves forward. There is a beastly asymmetrical game here and if the casual player base is left behind questioning the potential of this game, there will be a lost opportunity here to gain interest. Dead by Daylight is still running three years later but they have learned that tutorial implementation is important for the long term and are improving it in the next few months even. Do not stray off yourself, Deathgarden! Teach your players in game and early while you can! Also, this was the most stable alpha I have ever had the pleasure in participating. Minimal bugs if even any.
Behaviour Interactive has done a great job on Dead by Daylight and the concepts have translated well into a newer paced sub-genre. This team needs to stomp early concerns out with all this feedback and make this game stand the test of time. I believe it can.
This review was played primarily on PC (Ultra settings). Note, all images provided were taken from official press releases advertising "Deathgarden" or recorded in game with an owned version.
Disclaimer: I was not paid nor offered any incentives to write this review by the accompanying publisher, developer or any outside force. This is solely for personal production and interest. My opinions and recommendations are based off my personal interpretation of the product and it's design.