We just don’t get to see many story-based shooters these days, with most titles in the genre being focused on multiplayer gameplay, be it a new battle royale or a new take on the extraction shooter genre. Better Than Dead, however, offers a fresh new twist on the classic single-player shooter formula with its unique gameplay systems and general structure that feels more in line with an arcade machine than it does a typical shooter.
Better Than Dead has an incredibly serious premise. The player is put into the shoes of an unnamed girl that some criminals kidnapped. This awakens a hunger for revenge in the girl, and she decides that it’s time for her to stop being a victim. The first level essentially acts as her escape attempt after finding a pistol, and the core gameplay kicks off in full swing right away. As another layer of her revenge, the girl also wears a bodycam—which acts as the player’s perspective—to film the criminals that had dared to torture her.
There isn’t really much more to the story of Better Than Dead; the narrative almost entirely takes place through the environment and the various mission objectives you get. The girl seemingly has a list of people against whom she wants revenge, and each level acts as an escalation in her attempts to get at these people. There are also a few twists thrown your way, like one mission where you have to rescue another girl that was going to be victimized by the criminals, or an escape mission where the gangs you’ve been hunting down have found out where you live.
What makes Better Than Dead a truly interesting experience from a gameplay standpoint is how its gunplay works. The girl isn’t a trained fighter, and as such, you don’t get any form of a HUD to keep track of things like your health, stamina, or even a crosshair with which to aim your shots. Her overall lack of training also means that early levels will largely have you wildly flailing your arms around while firing, hoping that you hit an enemy rather than an innocent civilian. Aiming down sights doesn’t really help either, since the pistol has quite a bit of recoil.
However, the girl’s general incompetence doesn’t really last too long. As you make your way through the game’s 14 levels, you’ll find your shots hitting the right targets way more often. Her improvements are shown in-game in quite subtle ways, like her hands having better control over the gun’s recoil, and even her overall movement speed getting better and sliding on the ground feeling less clumsy.
“The girl isn’t a trained fighter, and as such, you don’t get any form of a HUD to keep track of things like your health, stamina, or even a crosshair with which to aim your shots.”
Speaking of which, sliding on the floor is the only other ability you have aside from shooting your gun, and it will undoubtedly end up being your best friend. Pulling off a slide out of a sprint kicks off slow-motion, which helps quite a bit when dealing with the manic pace of combat throughout Better Than Dead. Once the girl’s accuracy improves, the slow motion also helps quite a bit in rooms that are crowded with innocent people, giving you more time to aim for the correct targets.
Better Than Dead also has a hidden scoring system with which it grades your performance. While you don’t get to see how well you might be doing during a level, you get a ranking at the end depending on how much time you took, how many enemies you killed, and how many innocents got caught in the crossfire.
It is worth noting that Better Than Dead is an incredibly fast-paced game, and the title even goes out of its way at times to remind you that trying to take cover and exchanging shots with enemies will likely result in your death. Rather, you’re supposed to be running and gunning, and making full use of your slide to kick off slow motion. Either way, death has the tendency to come quite quickly, and as a result, you’ll find yourself restarting entire levels often. Unfortunately, this was one of my major complaints about the shooter – the complete lack of any checkpoints.
While this wouldn’t really be an issue in most circumstances, Better Than Dead tends to have long levels with plenty of enemies, so the difficulty can often feel quite high, at least until you’ve repeated a level a few times. This trial-and-error gameplay loop works quite well in something faster paced, like the classic Hotline Miami titles, but Better Than Dead takes just a bit too long to get you back into the game following a death. This can make death feel more frustrating than it should.
As for the levels themselves, Better Than Dead opts for a photo-realistic perspective that has been heavily stylized thanks to the fish-eye lens and other distortions offered by the bodycam perspective. Generally speaking, the grounded, dirty levels that take you through the shady underworld of the unnamed city have been realized quite well, which is an impressive feat since it was made by a solo developer. The visual style of the game also pulls off a neat trick where just about everyone’s face has been pixelated, making the game look like a brutal news story you might catch in the evening.
“Better Than Dead opts for a photo-realistic perspective that has been heavily stylized thanks to the fish-eye lens and other distortions offered by the bodycam perspective.”
When it comes to performance, Better Than Dead runs quite well. I had essentially zero performance issues throughout my time with the shooter, running it on an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU, a Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU, and 32 GB of RAM. The title was able to maintain a rock-solid frame rate of over 80 FPS the entire time, and even when new levels were loading in, I never felt any stutters or hitches. The fact that the performance is this good right off the bat despite it being an Early Access release bodes quite well for the game in the longer term.
I also have to give a special shout out to the clever use of music throughout Better Than Dead. While there isn’t really any music when most levels start, with the game instead focusing on the environmental sounds of busy streets or quiet ground floors of an old residential building, Once you’ve faced a couple of criminals, the music starts slowly kicking in, putting you in the necessary flow state that you’ll need to take on the game’s challenging levels. The music is also chosen quite well; a hideout, for example, will have a bass-thumping track, while a shootout in the slums will feature more guitars.
My only major complaint with Better Than Dead comes down to the fact that it is an incredibly short game that is packed with strong gameplay elements that could be used quite well with different game modes. While it is an Early Access game, and developer MONTE GALLO has also noted that there are plans to bring in an entirely new game mode that will be a “larger extension” of the core experience, in its current state, you won’t really get much more than an evening’s play time out of it. This is a shame, since the core gameplay is surprisingly addictive, and even just adding an arcade-styled mode where the scoring is more visible could boost its replayability quite a bit.
This game was reviewed on PC.
