Death's Life is a somewhat unusual game with a novel concept. You've got to kill people, but make it look like an accident. To that end, you're presented with a simple low poly/cel-shaded looking scene, and you must arrange various objects in the scene by tapping on them. You then trigger the "workflow" and the objects will bump into each other/fall onto each other etc, and if you get the arrangement right, it will kill your target. It's definitely a viable concept for a game, but you end up figuring out the puzzles in just a couple of minutes through trial and error, leaving the oh-so-edgy dark humour of watching a gruesome cartoon death.
This is one of those games where, if Valve gave us a "maybe" option, I'd choose that. It's overpriced for what you get, and the gameplay becomes a bit shallow almost immediately, so the only real point is to watch how each death happens. There's zero replayability and you can probably finish the game in less than 2 hours (and thus get a refund despite finishing the game, but I don't condone that kind of thing), and that's another problem here. Ultimately I feel this might have done a lot better on the mobile app stores and I was very surprised when I couldn't find it there.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game features low-polygon "retro" assets with a cel-shading type shader effects instead of doing their job properly and texturing the game assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. This visual style is a method that lazy devs often use when they have a lack of interest/capabilty to create highly detailed, high poly models and instead use shader effects to disguise that shortcoming under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It's far below the state of the art visuals gamers expect as a result of their decisions.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).
Regardless, for all intents and purposes Death's Life might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Death's Life has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for completing the tutorial, trivial to achieve, but less than 4 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 4 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
Death's Life is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. If you see it free on app stores some time in the future, maybe try it out there.
