Death by Game Show is an action game with a heavy dose of tower defense smashed into an Idiocracy presentation. It unfortunately delivers less on the latter and, while decent, ends up failing to live up to the wacky premise it sets up.
Death by Game Show
Developer: Oointah
Price: $15
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with PC code for review
Far off in the future humans have become complete morons so robots decided they’re better suited to running things. Unfortunately for Wutt, he’s smart enough to stand out and since robots like their humans nice and dumb, he’s sentenced to death by game show. The game opens up with this clear Idiocracy setup with a slight twist but it never really does anything with it. There are background signs in the level with occasional jokes, but you’re too busy actually playing to read them and the robotic host makes super unfunny “jokes” in-between levels. There are just a few references to the film while everything else has predictably dumb names such as your robotic pal G.I.M.P. who provides your robot fodder. There are also quotes from other Mike Judge creations such as Office Space littered throughout the game but, like the rest of the humor, it doesn’t really gel with the game you’re playing. For something that’s selling itself on the fact that it’s evoking the style of the film, it does an incredibly piss poor job of accomplishing it.
Death by Game Show advertises itself as an action strategy game, but in reality it plays more like a fast paced tower defense. You’re able to walk across this 2D circular plane where you can drop towers and send units to go fight off enemies and blow up their towers. Instead of having a base, think of yourself as the base and you’re also working to complete objectives in order to summon a rocket to escape before the timer ends. You have a slew of robotic minions to summon and towers to drop to help fend off the same robotic minions and towers being sent against you; strategizing which towers to use and when to use which robots will help keep you alive. You also have a small selection of robots that are fueled by an energy meter. Get too hasty by overspending it and your G.I.M.P. unit (which is chained to you by the way) gets exhausted which slows down its energy recharge AND considerably slows down your already sluggish pace, meaning smart energy usage is key. All of this culminates in a hectic package that’s quite fun when it works.
Rounding out the package is a level editor that lets you edit practically every element of the game. You’re able to customize your own challenge map, edit the rewards given or even the sprites for the models themselves. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but I’m always happy to see tower defense games that let you make your own levels. There are fifteen levels for you to work through with some having multiple parts to them, so the game should last you a decent while. However besides that and the level creator itself, there’s not really much else to the game.
Unfortunately, the interesting mechanics Death by Game Show sets up come tumbling down after an early, sharp difficulty spike and each stage ends up feeling too similar to the previous. Compounding on that, many levels require you to use towers or special characters since victory with your free units is all but impossible. The problem is that you have a finite amount of towers and special units and the main way to get more is by going back to previous levels, beating them again and basically grinding them out for rewards. I can understand being given a certain amount of towers to use per level, as many defense games do this, but requiring players to go back and basically grind to rebuild their inventory and pray they’re successful, lest all that time be wasted, is just bad design.
Some other, more minor, issues makes the entire experience frustrating when all these negative elements combine together. Hovering your mouse over an item to see its stats takes way too long in what’s supposed to be a fairly hectic game. I should be able to see immediately what something does instead of having to waste time waiting for the popup to show. Another issue I had is your inability to jump. You have no way of defending yourself (without grinding for temporary weapons) so dodging enemies that get too close (or those stupidly accurate explosive barrel towers) can be a problematic situation. The issue is exacerbated when you have challenges that require you to reach a certain amount of cash collected which can be troublesome if your bombers manage to blow up a building but your way is blocked by enemies and anti-ground towers. Now you’re sitting there frantically trying to clear the path as you watch the coins fall off the map out of reach of your grappling hook. It also doesn’t help that on many occasions the more valuable coins will be lumped in a group of worthless ones and if you grab the worthless coins with your hook, it’ll push the coins you want further out of reach. Alone, these quirks would be minor setbacks but bundled together it can make for a very frustrating package at times.
The Final Word
Death by Game Show is, ultimately, a neat but flawed diversion that would be better if it weren’t so needlessly frustrating and grindy so early on in the game.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
