Better Late Than DEAD

[h1]This game was reviewed using a code sent by the developer/publisher.[/h1] Better Late Than DEAD is a survival adventure game developed by Odin Game Studios, being published on Steam in July of 2015 on Early Access. As we have come all too familiar with the survival genre of games; you start off as a single character, dropped in the middle of nowhere and you are expected to survive. Games of this genre are often a hit from the start or just flop straight away. Unfortunately Better Late Than DEAD does not have a very bright future in my eyes. Gameplay is…well, almost none existent. I started out in the ocean and had to swim at least five minutes before I got to any sort of land. I spent almost an hour exploring the island, finding a couple of houses, and that is it. Whilst exploring the houses I found that each of them had their own loot, strangely enough, the houses were all an exact copy of each other and the loot was spawned in exactly the same place. The loot that I found were again, everything you would expect to find in this type of game, cans of food, bandages, knives, etc. As far as game play goes, that is it. There is absolutely nothing else to do in this game; I didn’t find any animals, enemies, nothing. The graphics are bad to say the least; the screenshots really shows the game in a different light to how it actually looks in real time. Awfully low quality textures on almost everything, the water certainly doesn’t look like how it does in the screenshots, and neither does the skybox. On top of the poor graphics, the animation side of the game is horrible; your character has just an awful run cycle that looks like some sort of jelly man was used to rig it – also this game features possibly one of the highest jumping ability I have ever seen in a game, I swear I was jumping up entire flights of stairs in one go… It should also be known, that from jumping, I managed to break my leg in the game twice and die from it once – lord knows how. At the beginning of the game, I was presented with a cut scene that sets up for a quite interesting story; but that is it. After that intro, I found no other plot elements, or anything. I was particularly disappointed as I would have really liked to have seen more of it. Hopefully the developers will be adding something in via patches in the future on this aspect. Better Late Than DEAD also has some audio problems. Whilst playing the game, you will have the same repetitive soundtrack playing in the background, and when it loops, boy do you notice it. There is an obvious cut in the track, and it just starts playing again; this for me seemed like a really basic issue which should not be seen in the game, it really ruined the game’s immersion (the little it actually had). I really expected the world I was in to be full of interesting environments and buildings to explore, but sadly due to the copy/paste nature shown in the game, it all seemed to blur together and nothing really stood out as interesting. All of the buildings are exactly the same layout, tress look exactly the same, it just looks like someone has gone in and press CTRL A CTRL V over and over again to make it seem like the world is huge. Sadly the game is very poorly optimized. Whilst the game has the options to run on all resolutions up to 4k, it certainly doesn’t run well. Playability is none existent at 4k, so I had to drop it to 1080p, and even then, I was not able to reach 60 fps and that is with my monster rig. This needs to be the top of their agenda at the very least. At the time of writing this review, I have been playing for just over two hours; I honestly don’t see myself jumping into the game any time again soon, unless there are some major changes and improvements on what the game currently has. The last update to the game from what I can see is 18th November 2015, and even then, only two new additions to the game were added. If anyone is interested in the survival genre, there are definitely games out there that are still in early access, and are in a much much better state than this game at the moment. Even though the game is retailing for £6,99, I still cannot recommend this game. It may improve, but it is going to take a lot for it to be even worthy of that low price. [b][u] Tom's Score Card[/u][/b] 1) Stay away [b][u]2) Not Recommended[/u][/b] 3) Only recommended when on sale 4) Recommended 5) Highly recommended 6) This is a must play If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up. You can also find more reviews over at http://www.completingthebackloggroup.com/ Please also check out Completing the Backlog's Curator page [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/completingthebacklog#curation]here[/url] - follow for regular updates on reviews for other games! http://store.steampowered.com/app/352950

TL;DR Better Late than Dead is too early access to recommend spending your hard-earned cash on, unless you're a die-hard fan of survival games (like there aren't enough to choose from). Better Late than Dead is a game that is still marred hugely by it's early access state. For those familiar with survival games, BLTD is the quintessential example - but with too many flaws currently to rationalize the price. BTLD is a game of too many button presses. In most games, you could press E or F to pick up a nearby item. In BTLD you must right-click to zoom in (on an already slightly off camera angle, another thing that bothered me), pan over to the item in question with a slightly unreasonable amount of exactness, and left click. The inventory systems mirrors this as well. Clicking an item current brings up a context menu, but the only options currently are to drop or equip something. This means that all food, water, bandages, etc must be used from the quickbar, when in many cases it could be more easily used straight from the inventory. This issue is exaserbated by the fact that there are only 4(?!) quickbar slots. Eating a mango should be a quick trip to the inventory, but it is instead a matter of equipping it, activating it, and THEN eating it. Pressing the relevant quickbar key doesn't automatically activate, you must click another time before watching your character enter into an awkward eating animation. Speaking of animations, that is another thing this game does poorly from what I saw. The character runs in a very goofy fashion, especially if he becomes injured. Injury seems to be incurred too easily - I walked for several in-game hours on a broken ankle or whatever caused by jumping off a rock that didn't come up to the character's knees. Lastly, the character model is pretty ugly. His beard doesn't look even the least bit natural, and neither does his butt. It seriously looks like the left side is twice the side of his right, which is made worse by the aforementioned running animation. You're probably thinking, "I could seriously care less about this character's butt", but lemme tell you, you'll be looking at it for the majority of your time playing BLTD.

An impressive example what can happen if you buy early access games. Changed rock skin, but not the important parts of the game. Game felt like brutal early alpha version and now they launched it, because "it is finished!" Cash grab. Nothing more. Avoid it.

Abandoned, unfinished, no more updates, not much fun, incomplete. I think that about covers it, no? Just in case you are still reading and considering a purchase let me warn you that you really should not buy this unfinished game unless you fully comprehend the state that it's in right now. It is *NEVER* going to be finished, the dev. abandoned it. I simply can't recommend it because the game is still in a very unfinished state, and is not really much fun to play.

[DEC 23, 2017] i don't even know why this game is still available for grabs and still goes on sale. Stay away from this game as it is ABANDONED. [FEB 14, 2016] As of now the game has not undergone any update since last year, now the game is looking more dead than ever. I suggest that you stay away until it more work has been done on it or it gets finished. [OLD REVIEW (JULY 30, 2015)] [Recommended = 32 of 50 people (64%) found this review helpful 1 person found this review funny] [THIS IS AN EARLY ACCESS REVIEW, CHANGES ON THE REVIEW WILL CHANGE OVER TIME UNTIL IT IS FINISHED.] This game shows promise, however it's in early alpha so there is not much to do yet. mechanics that need improvement(in the short amount of time i played): player movement, combat system. graphics. key bindings. camera. though playable, it's still not recommendable to many.

Alright, so after I had this game in my library untouched for months, I decided to play it. I'm a huge fan of survival games, thus my decision to purchasing this game wondering what it will be like. Ok, so you strand on an island, there is body bags everywhere of dead people, sometimes next to them is food, idk why but there just is. Don't worry you can eat it, as this is the main resource to get rid of your hunger bar, same for thirst. It took me a while to figure out how to cut trees aswell, at first I thought trees were attacking me as soon as I started to hit them, little did I know I was actually cutting them, thus I got sticks. At this point I've already spend most of my time exploring and finding items which I can use to even collect these stick. (Note: Punching trees does not work, you can't punch, you will need an item of some sort.) The borky sound/music that plays when you get near a village just annoys the f*ck out of me. If you turn your character around at some point it will just play over and over again. Anyway, I continued exploring in search for food, cause that felt like my entire main quest. I noticed a deer, awesome, flesh. So I chased it with an axe, untill the deer ran right through a wall and escaped. I stopped playing after I tried to craft a camp fire, like I couldn't even be bothered anymore at this point to even figure out how to get leaves.. since there is only 10% of the objects where you can get resources from. Ok so to bundle this up: Pros: - I actually liked the way how you were able to pick up items. - Sleeping works. Cons: - Everything except you, can walk through walls. - Only 10% of the island can be used for resources. - Crafting, without using a wiki to even figure out where to get the resources.

Avoid this game, its half baked and is worse than having Delhi Belly! I bought this during Early Access and very little has changed since then! The game is still buggy, ugly and pretty much pointless. There are plenty of other good alternatives such as "The Long Dark". Avoid this game, even if heavily discounted. Avoid the game's developer until they change their shoddy practices and start giving a damn about quality control of their products.

Do not buy Dead game. Odin studio dead since the end 2016. Do not understand why you still have the ability to buy it.

Guten Abendmond! :) Ich habe mir eben dieses Spiel einmal genauer angeguckt und muss sagen, dass ich positiv überrascht bin. Nicht nur bietet dieses Spiel eine Open World, sie verführt einen zudem auch noch in stilvoll, minimalistisch geprägte Hausschaften. Hier einmal eine Reihe von positiven Eigenschaften von: Lieber spät, als tot! - karibische Atmosphäre - ein kleiner Preis von etwas über einem Groschen! - eine ausgeprägte Tierwelt - Hausbau Simulations würdige Baumechanics - Leicht schwerer Survival Aspekt, welcher einen an seine Zockergrenzen bringt! - unterschiedliche Spawns (2 :o) - man kann schwimmen - schöne flora und fauna, wie oben erwähnt - man kann sich ein bein brechen! OMG! - keine ablenkung durch interessante orte und gegner und items und spielspaß und tollem gameplay Alles in einem finde ich, dass das Spiel hier viel Potential hat das nächste hype game zu werden. Ich kann die negativen Bewertungen NICHT nachvolliehen. Liebe Grüße: euer Sterzik!!!

Better Late Than DEAD is a very bizzare game and feels like it should still be in early access. I couldn't play more than just 30 minutes because of wanky mouse controls, strange item grab mechanics and worst of all glitches. I went to sleep, woke up in the middle of the night laying on the floor but I couldn't get up but I could spin around like crazy and if I spammed space bar hard enough I ascended into heaven. The crafting is slim, maybe there's more to be unlocked I do not know because I did not get that far into the game. Still have no idea how to get sticks. There is no tutorial on crafting. The graphics are mediocre which would not be a bad thing if the gameplay could stand up on its own but right now there just isn't anything there to carry the game. Overall, I do not reccomend this game because it does not feel complete and has many flaws as mentioned above. These things should not exist in a final product especially one that costs £10.99