Deadfall Adventures

Deadfall Adventures is partially inspired by the Allan Quatermain series of books written in the late 1800's and early 1900's, and partially inspired by adventure films such as the Indiana Jones and The Mummy franchises. It is a first person shooter with some exploration and puzzle solving set in 1938. It is also just okay as a game. Featuring all of the hallmarks of cheaply made AA titles doomed to the bargain bin at your local gamestop almost as soon as they were released, Deadfall Adventures is a clunky, janky, buggy nonsensical way to spend about 10-12 hours of your life depending on difficulty chosen and how hard you try to look for all the treasures. The writing is impressively bad, I'm positive they hired a bunch of university students who wanted to be writers, locked them in an office with a bunch of adventure films and told to write a game exactly like that. Then told them they'd be fired for fact checking or googling anything related to the subject matter to prevent any hope of it making sense and also that they had a month tops to finish their work. They then hired the voice actors on Fiverr. In fact they might not even be voice actors, just volunteers approached on the street. The puzzles, which make up for about half of the gameplay, vary wildly in difficulty from completely illogical garbage that no normal human could ever understand on their own to so easy it's on par with those cheap looking plastic toys you give to your baby to help it learn shapes. Some of them are incredibly easy to softlock or require reflexes and precise movement which is never a good thing to begin with but becomes even more frustrating with a game that controls as poorly as this one. Normally the movement feels okay enough, but there was an infuriating timed jumping puzzle in one of the arctic levels that really tested my endurance. There are a number of floating objects that rise and sink on a schedule, and you've got to make it across five or six jumps to a platform where a treasure item is then make it back across via a slightly different route. There are times during this sequence where you've got maybe five seconds to make the next jump, so you really need to learn the pattern and know what your next move is before you make it. Failure results in instant death and reloading the last checkpoint, which to be fair was no more than thirty seconds earlier. The problem is that sometimes you just slip off the platform, or jump short, or fail to jump at all, or your camera decides to start slowly spinning, and while this sounds like user error I got very consistent in my movements after switching from controller to mouse and keyboard for this part. I noticed that all of this crap could happen at random despite carrying out the exact same sequence of key presses as the previous attempt aiming for the exact same spot on the next platform, yet the camera issue was specific to two platforms in the middle of the route. I have to be fair and acknowledge that this could just be cope after what I'm sure was thirty plus failed attempts, but I am positive this was bugged. The other half of the gameplay is a fairly standard first person shooter, and I had enough fun with this part of the experience to make even the worst parts of the game feel worth it. There's a video walkthrough series in the guides section of the steam community hub if one gets stuck, so even the most poorly made puzzles can be easily passed if you decide it isn't worth beating your head against a brick wall to do them without help. The last few levels actually get a little scary which was nice, and some of the environments look kind of pretty after they load in properly. There are some awful graphical issues, and even when it is fully functional the game looks a little bit behind the times. It's hard to believe that this came out only 6 months or so (on PC and xbox) than Wolfenstein: The New Order, which was visually stunning. Also, there's no point in trying the multiplayer. I don't think it works and even if it does you're not gonna find any matches. Part of me wants to say this isn't worth more than a 5/10 as the negatives outweigh the positives in terms of sheer number, but overall I really did have a lot of fun. I'll give it a slightly generous 6/10, and would recommend it to someone who doesn't expect anything more than a low budget adventure and doesn't mind needing a guide at times. A discount of at least 75% off is strongly advised.