Deadly Premonition

Story – 9/10

In terms of storyline, Deadly Premonition is one of the best I’ve ever seen in video games but not for the usual reasons. The storyline focuses on the main protagonist, York, who is an unorthodox FBI agent investigating a serial killer in a small town. 

A big highlight for me is that the game refuses to take itself seriously where the characters act accordingly based on your gameplay decisions. For example there are various points where you have to travel with other characters but you can also choose not to. Not doing so can cause some hilarious dialogue mainly aimed at York being an unaware lunatic - something that York continually disregards.

I really like that the gameplay interlinks with the story but the main highlight is comic value portrayed throughout, even during moments of seriousness.

Picture – 4/10

The visual quality of the game is very poor for Xbox360 standard. It’s very blocky and even during cut scenes, the characters appear rigid and if they are being forced to act. They also make strange gestures during conversations which leads me down the poor development path as opposed to being done on purpose for comedy.

Sound – 7/10

Going in line with the comedy elements described under the story, the accompanying music adds to the comic element. Some reviews have criticised this approach but I think it is genius, especially when playing light-hearted Jazz music during tense situations.

Gameplay – 2/10

This is where the game falls on its comic-horror ass. ‘Glitchy as fuck’ is a generous description of the gameplay which is a shame as all the good points above are undone by the game failing to do what it is created to do – be PLAYABLE.

On two occasions I have found myself completely stuck because the game has glitched and prevented me from progressing. One of these times was towards the end of a long and arduous section where one of the zombies wouldn’t load and it wouldn’t let me continue until I had killed every zombie in the room. I lost roughly half an hour of my life for no reason due to poor development.

Other situations involve the game not allowing me to progress even though I’ve done the required prerequisite activity. Sometimes the cut scenes won’t load and other times the game freezes completely.

However the one that nearly resulted in the death of my controller was when I was replaying a chapter to finish the trading card collection. It is important to note that you cannot save the game during a chapter replay I had collected about 5 cards which has taken about an hour. I went to the location of the next card and fell through a hole in the graphics, dying and losing all my progress. This is just unacceptable in terms of developer short cuts.

These are my massive gameplay issues. However, I also found the areas of driving and shooting to be sadly lacking, which is shit when you take into account that driving and shooting take up about 90% of the active gameplay.

The driving controls are awful. If you go down a hill, without any modifications to your car, as soon as your vehicle reaches 60mph, you can no longer control it and it veers off to the side of the road and smashes into the invisible barrier, if you happen to be driving next to a grassy embankment.

The combat aspects of the game are just as bad, if not worse. I lost count of the amount of times I’ve shot armed zombies (what is that about?!) with a shotgun from point blank range for them to then shoot me as if i did nothing. And then York falls on the floor holding his face in loads of pain... hmm. Really? Also it is unreasonable, on any level of difficulty, for a zombie to take 16+ headshots AND STILL NOT DIE. Why not just make it harder to shoot the zombies in the head? That would have at least made the combat scenarios more bearable.

That doesn’t leave much else of the game that isn’t poorly developed except for what I’ve already mentioned, making my score of 2 actually quite generous.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 12 Achievements

I’m all for secret achievements under one premise – that they are story linked and are unmissable. Deadly Premonition fails to meet these criteria in that there are achievements for completing the game on each difficulty level and another for completing an in game collection and they are all listed as secret.

Failure number two on the achievement front is having non stackable achievements. To earn 1,000 point you have to play through on all three difficulties. This is really irritating especially when it is mainly a story driven game and there is not that much difference in the challenge level between difficulties. This makes for the most frustrating aspect of these achievements in having to replay a story driven game three times to earn the 1,000 points.

Downloadable Content – Not Applicable

Summary

Deadly Premonition is definitely worth playing from a story point of view, but if you fancy a 100% game I would avoid it. Having to play a game three times when it is exactly the same in each of these occasions is a definite miss for me.