Death Squared

Another Ultimate Head to Head game was next on the list for completion and it was annoying me for a while. Death Squared is a puzzle game and that’s fun to play and has basic controls so it didn’t take a lot of re-learning to go back to, yet for some reason I kept putting it off. Until one weekend I decided to sort it out and finish the damn thing. Well, that’s a half truth. I did party mode one weekend and then the main game on another weekend. But I still took a few months of break in between.

Death Squared has a sort of story mode where David is testing robot AIs with an AI companion. They share witty banter where David is a useless employee and is constantly being put through his paces as the AI winds him up. Most of this is just background irritation for the most part but there are some genuinely funny bits interspersed with the annoyance. My favourite bit involves David having to install a software update throughout most of the game and he keeps refusing the update. When he finally caves and allows the AI to update it, another software update is required immediately after. His outrage is comical.

The gameplay is simple but, I have to say, it can be incredibly fussy and infuriating. In the main game, you control two square robot AIs and are tasked with navigating them to the exit platforms. You have to get both bots onto both platforms to complete the levels. There are 80 levels, each getting progressively more complicated. It takes a while to get through it all too. Most of the levels consist of hidden traps and lasers which take a lot of trial and error to get past.

I mentioned that it was frustrating and here’s why. The analogue sticks move the bots and the right stick moves the blue one and the left stick moves the red one. I think. I have no idea if that’s correct and therein lies the problem – I got this wrong so many times which caused bot-death on several occasions. Incredibly frustrating, especially when you’ve navigated past the hard shit to just fall off a single platform when you are about to complete the level.

Also, the bots hate you. There will try their hardest to die at every opportunity and if you misjudge a movement by a millimetre, the bot will fall to its doom. Sometimes they will even ‘get stuck’ and blow up, again in a very unforgiving manner.

Now, picture these frustrations and imagine having to deal with four bots instead of two. Enter Party Mode. It’s more puzzle levels with the addition of two extra bots and you can switch between who you are controlling by using the bumper buttons. It’s essentially the same but with more complications. The last level here in particular takes an age to get through so imagine the blood curdling screams getting to the very end of this level to then lose green-bot because it got slightly to close to an edge.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

Completing both story mode and party mode will earn 10 of the achievements. Aside from this, there are a few miscellaneous things to do such dying 50 times in one level, making all 4 bots dance at the same and making them all die at the same time. All three of these are best done in party mode and the last two can only be done in party mode as you need 4 bots. There are also achievements for skipping the intro and watching the credits, this last one can only be done after completing the game for some bizarre reason, despite it having a credits bit in the options.

After these, there are three other things that need to be done. The first is completing 9 levels in a row without dying. Thankfully these can be any 9 levels so the first and easiest levels can be replayed until the bots decide not to commit suicide in consecutive arenas. To be fair, it’s tough to die once you know the level layouts and this isn’t too tricky.

The next thing is collecting secret items. There are ten secrets in ten different story levels and you have to do some strange shit with the bots to get them. Some of the later ones are quite complicated too but there are loads of video guides out there to help.

The last one involves dying a lot. 999 times to be exact. I got to less than half of this by the time I was done with everything above so it’s mini grind but thankfully one that can be done with an elastic band on one of the party levels repeatedly killing all four bots at once.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Death Squared is a fun but occasionally frustrating puzzle gaming experience. It took me around twelve hours to complete doing probably about 80% of the game without the use of video guides. However, the last levels do become a sequence of repeatedly horrible trial and error without guides.