Last week, we informed you about the release of Dead Effect. BadFly Interactive had already provided us with a review code, therefore we decided to give this new FPS title a go. Thus, you can read below our First Impressions of it, accompanied with a 10-minute gameplay video from the game’s second mission.
Dead Effect was originally released on mobile devices and made its jump to the PC platform recently. According to BadFly Interactive, Dead Effect comes with 12 story campaign missions that last around 5 hours, 14 upgradable weapons, as well as two additional modes (Survive and Biohazard).
Ironically enough, the transition from mobile devices to the PC is not as awful as the one we witnessed with Deus Ex: The Fall. Dead Effect comes with a respectable amount of graphics options, offers a FOV slider, and sports options to adjust both mouse smoothing and mouse acceleration.
Graphics wise, the game looks good if we take account of its origins. What really surprised us was the fact that multiple light sources cast shadows on all enemies on screen. Believe it or not, Dead Effect can be considered ‘more advanced’ in that area than a lot of multi-platform titles, something that definitely feels awkward as we’re talking about a mobile game (whether BadFly increased the number of lights casting shadows in the PC version remains a mystery).
Naturally, this is a mindless shooter, so don’t expect anything fancy. You won’t really care about the storyline, even though there are lots of places to explore and various tablets to collect (that give an insight into what actually happened). There are some amateur-ish set pieces to further progress the action itself, though they feel a bit too weak and unimpressive (especially if we compare them to those of all other triple-A shooters).
Everything would be in Dead Effect’s favour if it wasn’t for its disappointing audio. There are cheesy dialogues all over the place, voice acting – in generall – is awful, sound effects are laughable, and everything simply falls apart the moment our main male character decides to speak. We strongly believe that BadFly should turn the protagonist into a silent guy instead of using those amateur-ish samples. Harsh words, we know, but the game would actually benefit from an audio overhaul.
At the end of the day, Dead Effect is not THAT bad as most PC gamers originally thought. It looks cool, it works wonderfully with mouse+keyboard, you can disable both mouse smoothing and acceleration effects, and will remind you of all those older B-type FPS games (that flooded the market a couple of years ago but they are nowhere to be found these days).
The game is priced at 7,99€ on Steam (with 498 positive user reviews). We believe that a more appropriate priced would be at 5€ (as we’d definitely recommend it at that price, despite its shortcomings).
Dead Effect is far from being described as the worst FPS low-budget game available. In fact, Dead Effect can be fun, especially when there are so few FPS sci-fi titles these days.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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