Get in the bag, future criminal.
Published: July 30, 2010
Earlier in the year I lamented that there was not enough humour in games. It seemed that spectacle had replaced wit and comedy was no longer cool.
Fortunately, things seem set to change: games like Monkey Island and Sam and Max are filling the PSN and helping make the world a better place. The horrible memory of Matt Hazard dragging his greasy hands over my face is gradually starting to fade and I’ve promised myself to never be fooled by the likes of him again.
As a result of my earth-shatteringly bad experience with Blood Bath and Beyond (here) I was all geared up to hate DeathSpank with a fiery passion. The trailers hinted towards that strange blend of humour that manages to try too hard but simultaneously aims too low, whilst the gameplay looked in danger of falling into the awful trap of spoofing terrible games by playing like a terrible game.
Within five minutes of booting up the game all of my fears had vanished: DeathSpank is very, very funny.
Imagine The Tick given a helmet and sent out to batter increasingly ridiculous enemies and you’re most of the way to having an understanding of what DeathSpank is about. It’s a loot-based, directly-controlled Diablo-‘em-up starring a character whose incredible heroism is only dwarfed by his breathtaking stupidity.
The best thing is it’s really good fun.
Starting the game with a boot on a stick and a sword on a log (or, as the game asks, is it a log on a sword?) you’re turned out on a series of increasingly peculiar quests and side-quests to clobber your way through waves of imaginative enemies, all the while gathering the sort of overtly hokey weaponry that would make poor old Garry Gygax spin in his +15 Grave of Burial.
At its heart, the game is your standard fetch-questing horde-slaughtering fare, with tasks generally being of the ‘Kill X to get Y’ variety. Thankfully, the game manages to not fall into the trap mentioned above of having horrible gameplay in an ‘ironic’ way. The enemies are so imaginative and the loot so free-flowing that, for example, killing seven Giant Turtles in order to harvest their gonads doesn’t feel like a chore.
[page]
A good portion of the enemies that you’ll be mangling are either subversions of standard fantasy beasts - I still have nightmares about travelling through the Unicorn Meadow - or baddies based on feeble, yet strangely hilarious, puns. They’re all nicely designed and foolishly proportioned; even when swamped by waves of one type of enemy the game doesn’t get visually boring.
The visuals are one of the game’s real high points. 2D structures sit atop a 3D world and lazily roll into view, giving the impression that you’re in the middle of one giant, garishly coloured pop-up book - admittedly a hellish pop-up book written by a man who has just fallen down the stairs but a pop-up book nonetheless. The colours are bright and vibrant, the locations distinct and the enemies are all wonderfully inventive. Everything is sharp and crisp with only the bare minimum of screen tearing to be noticed.
With any game where you’re charged with mowing through waves of enemies, the combat has to be entertaining or there’ll be no drive to continue, no matter the quality of the writing. Once more DeathSpank manages to pull itself out of another trap by having a simple yet effective control system. By assigning various weapon to the face buttons and healing / area of effect items to the d-pad, your outrageously dim little chap can hare about the screen, bashing bad guys to your heart’s content. L2 locks on and R2 blocks, with a perfectly timed block instantly filling your ‘Justice Meter’ and allowing you to perform a powerful special attack. Different weapons have different special attacks and a little while into the game you start to collect items that allow the attacks to merge. To provide an incentive to use all the currently equipped weapons rather than the same giant-fist-on-a-stick over and over again, each hit with a different weapon builds your combo and fills your ‘Justice Meter’ that much faster.
Of course, a simple yet entertaining combat system will only take you so far without something to drive your adventure forward. DeathSpank is being sold first and foremost as a comedy game and it is on that basis that it should be most carefully scrutinised. Fortunately, with the magical brainpower of Ron Gilbert (of Monkey Island fame) being involved with a good portion of the game’s development, the script was in safe hands. Within the opening five minutes of the game I was laughing out loud. I can’t describe how rare an experience this is: to sit holding a controller with tears in your eyes and your jaw on the floor in disbelief is a truly wonderful thing. This game has some of the most consistently funny orphan-themed humour I’ve ever come across - and that is high praise indeed. Gags are everywhere; from stupid descriptions of items to breathtakingly silly dialogue between characters, it’s rare indeed that five minutes passes without something to make the player guffaw. The humour may not be to everyone’s taste, but for anyone who was a fan of The Tick, Earthworm Jim, Sam and Max &c. this should be a real treat.
Unfortunately, there are some annoying niggles present that stop this game just short of being fantastic. When buying weapons and armour, there is no option of comparing that which you’re buying against that which you already own, leading to awkward menu swapping and memorisation exercises which could have been easily avoided by, say, something similar to Borderlands’s comparison system.
Another real annoyance is the hastily tacked-on co-op mode. By using a second controller a chum can drop in and play as the wretched-looking Sparkles the Wizard. While it’s nice to have the option, this mode feels really lazily applied. Sparkles joins the game around DeathSpank’s level and can use one of three attacks, heal DeathSpank and...that’s it. Any loot goes straight to Player 1, Sparkles has no inventory of his own and no way to change his attacks for anything new. Playing as player 2 feels like being a true sidekick: an afterthought and a liability. If the drop in 2-player had been slightly more fleshed out it would have been a wonderful addition to a fantastic game. As it is, sadly, it cheapens the experience.
Overall though, DeathSpank is well worth buying. It’s pretty, very funny and will last you for a good few nights of fun. Plus, it will warm the cockles of your heart to know that you’re supporting a game that dares to be amusing in a world overpopulated by relentlessly grim shooters and Hannah Montana, The Musical, The Game.
Fortunately, things seem set to change: games like Monkey Island and Sam and Max are filling the PSN and helping make the world a better place. The horrible memory of Matt Hazard dragging his greasy hands over my face is gradually starting to fade and I’ve promised myself to never be fooled by the likes of him again.
As a result of my earth-shatteringly bad experience with Blood Bath and Beyond (here) I was all geared up to hate DeathSpank with a fiery passion. The trailers hinted towards that strange blend of humour that manages to try too hard but simultaneously aims too low, whilst the gameplay looked in danger of falling into the awful trap of spoofing terrible games by playing like a terrible game.
Within five minutes of booting up the game all of my fears had vanished: DeathSpank is very, very funny.
Imagine The Tick given a helmet and sent out to batter increasingly ridiculous enemies and you’re most of the way to having an understanding of what DeathSpank is about. It’s a loot-based, directly-controlled Diablo-‘em-up starring a character whose incredible heroism is only dwarfed by his breathtaking stupidity.
The best thing is it’s really good fun.
Starting the game with a boot on a stick and a sword on a log (or, as the game asks, is it a log on a sword?) you’re turned out on a series of increasingly peculiar quests and side-quests to clobber your way through waves of imaginative enemies, all the while gathering the sort of overtly hokey weaponry that would make poor old Garry Gygax spin in his +15 Grave of Burial.
At its heart, the game is your standard fetch-questing horde-slaughtering fare, with tasks generally being of the ‘Kill X to get Y’ variety. Thankfully, the game manages to not fall into the trap mentioned above of having horrible gameplay in an ‘ironic’ way. The enemies are so imaginative and the loot so free-flowing that, for example, killing seven Giant Turtles in order to harvest their gonads doesn’t feel like a chore.
[page]
A good portion of the enemies that you’ll be mangling are either subversions of standard fantasy beasts - I still have nightmares about travelling through the Unicorn Meadow - or baddies based on feeble, yet strangely hilarious, puns. They’re all nicely designed and foolishly proportioned; even when swamped by waves of one type of enemy the game doesn’t get visually boring.
The visuals are one of the game’s real high points. 2D structures sit atop a 3D world and lazily roll into view, giving the impression that you’re in the middle of one giant, garishly coloured pop-up book - admittedly a hellish pop-up book written by a man who has just fallen down the stairs but a pop-up book nonetheless. The colours are bright and vibrant, the locations distinct and the enemies are all wonderfully inventive. Everything is sharp and crisp with only the bare minimum of screen tearing to be noticed.
With any game where you’re charged with mowing through waves of enemies, the combat has to be entertaining or there’ll be no drive to continue, no matter the quality of the writing. Once more DeathSpank manages to pull itself out of another trap by having a simple yet effective control system. By assigning various weapon to the face buttons and healing / area of effect items to the d-pad, your outrageously dim little chap can hare about the screen, bashing bad guys to your heart’s content. L2 locks on and R2 blocks, with a perfectly timed block instantly filling your ‘Justice Meter’ and allowing you to perform a powerful special attack. Different weapons have different special attacks and a little while into the game you start to collect items that allow the attacks to merge. To provide an incentive to use all the currently equipped weapons rather than the same giant-fist-on-a-stick over and over again, each hit with a different weapon builds your combo and fills your ‘Justice Meter’ that much faster.
Of course, a simple yet entertaining combat system will only take you so far without something to drive your adventure forward. DeathSpank is being sold first and foremost as a comedy game and it is on that basis that it should be most carefully scrutinised. Fortunately, with the magical brainpower of Ron Gilbert (of Monkey Island fame) being involved with a good portion of the game’s development, the script was in safe hands. Within the opening five minutes of the game I was laughing out loud. I can’t describe how rare an experience this is: to sit holding a controller with tears in your eyes and your jaw on the floor in disbelief is a truly wonderful thing. This game has some of the most consistently funny orphan-themed humour I’ve ever come across - and that is high praise indeed. Gags are everywhere; from stupid descriptions of items to breathtakingly silly dialogue between characters, it’s rare indeed that five minutes passes without something to make the player guffaw. The humour may not be to everyone’s taste, but for anyone who was a fan of The Tick, Earthworm Jim, Sam and Max &c. this should be a real treat.
Unfortunately, there are some annoying niggles present that stop this game just short of being fantastic. When buying weapons and armour, there is no option of comparing that which you’re buying against that which you already own, leading to awkward menu swapping and memorisation exercises which could have been easily avoided by, say, something similar to Borderlands’s comparison system.
Another real annoyance is the hastily tacked-on co-op mode. By using a second controller a chum can drop in and play as the wretched-looking Sparkles the Wizard. While it’s nice to have the option, this mode feels really lazily applied. Sparkles joins the game around DeathSpank’s level and can use one of three attacks, heal DeathSpank and...that’s it. Any loot goes straight to Player 1, Sparkles has no inventory of his own and no way to change his attacks for anything new. Playing as player 2 feels like being a true sidekick: an afterthought and a liability. If the drop in 2-player had been slightly more fleshed out it would have been a wonderful addition to a fantastic game. As it is, sadly, it cheapens the experience.
Overall though, DeathSpank is well worth buying. It’s pretty, very funny and will last you for a good few nights of fun. Plus, it will warm the cockles of your heart to know that you’re supporting a game that dares to be amusing in a world overpopulated by relentlessly grim shooters and Hannah Montana, The Musical, The Game.
