Very rarely does a game come along, that is so broken that I physically cannot stand to finish it. Step up The Farm 51’s Deadfall Adventures, a game which demonstrates a developer’s ability to be lazy, sloppy and willing to put out a less-than half-assed attempt at a game. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised as these are the guys behind the dreadful reboot of the Painkiller series. And if this new game is anything to go by, it may be time for them to stop while they can’t get ahead.
That probably seems like a very harsh opening assessment of the game and the developers, but the only plus point I can come up with for the game is that the environments are well presented, and look nice at a distance…..and that is it. So let’s get to the disembowelment of the rest of it.
From the get go, you can see the pure plagiarism that the game is committing. It is so painfully an attempted rip off of Uncharted with a dash of Indiana Jones. It’s not even a gentle nod to an influential game, the character background is almost a carbon copy – you are a descendant of a famous adventurer (Allan Quartermain) have one of his famous items (in this case a compass) and you even have his notepad to help you with the game’s puzzles. Moving on to another blindingly obvious ‘influence’ is that the protagonist, James Lee Quartemain, is more or less a mirror image of Red Dead Redemption’s John Marston, which baffled me a bit in all honesty. But with the game playing out in first person mode I didn’t need to focus on that much. There is even an Alan Wake reference with the weaponised torch that is available to weaken undead enemies. Now, please don’t get me wrong, taking influence from other games isn’t a bad thing, but when it is used as more than an influence, and the game doesn’t bring anything of its own to the table, is when we could have a problem. And in all fairness, a combination of the above games could potentially be fantastic, with a lack of originality in the story writing, and an awful game engine, this is a game that falls at every single hurdle it attempts to jump.
The game engine itself is one of the huge downfalls. Everything feels very dated, and if it was released 5 years ago it still wouldn’t have been acceptable. I had to quite out of the game many times due to game breaking bugs. A number of occasions buttons just stopped functioning, I couldn’t aim down the sights, couldn’t change weapon, jump or pick up new weapons. So that’s the Left Trigger, Y and A buttons not functioning – more than once. I found myself stuck in the environment a few times aswell. Game prompts disappeared at times - so where you would usually be told you could interact with something, or pick an item up, the messages just wouldn’t appear. There are clear ‘invisible wall’ issues dotted about. I’d be walking into what is obviously a dead end anyway, but get stopped by the ‘wall’ a few feet from the rock face, and it’s similar when you are restricted from going to somewhere that looks accessible. There are inconsistencies with what you can and can’t jump on, frame rate issues which make the game judder all too often and extremely amateur AI, who looks to stick to their predetermined route, and will shoot constantly even when they can’t see you anymore. I discovered that at times even the sturdiest cover is useless as bullets come straight through huge stone pillars, and there are some embarrassingly dated looking animations on things such as falling stalactites. The shooting mechanics feel dated, where your aiming reticule stays dead on where you’re aiming despite the animation showing the weapon should have recoil. AI characters float up the stairs rather than stepping up the steps. Voiceovers vary from acceptable, to cringe worthy, and the repetitive nature of the snippets of voices during the gameplay will soon grind on you. And the lifeless looking character during cutscenes could do with a lesson of how to talk along with the audio. And even small things like the positioning of the RPG’s (especially when you’re running) starting annoying me when combined with everything else.
There are online modes and survival mode that I couldn’t bring myself to play after the unbearable experience I had with the single player. There is nothing that I can recommend about this game. Avoid at all costs.
