We’ve hit Tony Hawk and Wreckateer, now our rountable moves onto the third title in this years Summer of Arcade. Deadlight is the first game from Tequila Works and unfortunately it was not well received by most. We discuss just what went wrong.

Ross Adams: Deadlight is inarguably the worst of this years offerings. Though it showed a lot of promise beforehand.

Nathan Bowring: Easily the biggest let-down this SoA. I think it started off really strong, but then got too tedious and frustrating.

John Laster: Honestly. I think Deadlight has one of the best Demo’s I’ve seen in a long time. I honestly didn’t understand why you said skip in your review until I played beyond the first hour

Ross Adams: Yeah it’s unfortunate that the demo is the first half hour or so of the game, since I think it’ll pull a lot of people in. It starts really strong, but when it falls apart it falls apart in a pretty big way.

Nathan Bowring: I found the first chapter rather enjoyable, but the second one is where it fell apart. The horrible Rat sequence, and the helicopter chase frustrated me to no end.

John Laster: Yeah, around the Rat sequence is where it started to fall apart for me as well. I think it had some very clever use of achievement names though.

Nathan Bowring: I got about half of the achievements before I noticed they were all song titles!

John Laster: Until that point I was able to deal with everything including the tempermental wall jump but around that part it just kinda piled up to the point I couldn’t keep going

Ross Adams: When I started using the melee combat a bit is where I started to get worried, it’s super clunky.

John Laster: Oh totally. But then you get a pistol pretty quickly and it was very effective. I never seemed low on ammunition so I was hopeful that might replace the melee combat for a bit.

Ross Adams: Yeah the guns are great, super satisfying to use. They really should have just had that as the combat.
I loved the pacing of the first hour. I thought they nailed that.

Nathan Bowring: Guns would have been better than a slingshot during those sections, I don’t know why it didn’t have any effect on zombies.

John Laster: I think the problem with this one for me is it became rather frustrating but it wasn’t rewarding enough when I was sucessful for me to slog through everything. Unlike Dust which had the occasional cheap death-bad save point situation I was totally willing to put up with to continue. I think this is by far the biggest disappointment for me personally of any summer of arcade game.

Ross Adams: Honestly, had I not been reviewing it I doubt I’d have finished, despite ths shortness. There were several points where I took a break from playing because I was so annoyed.

Nathan Bowring: I haven’t even bothered going back to finish it after the first two chapters, there are much better games to play.

John Laster: I think that’s the one curse with SOA. Is that you’re theoretically surronded by solid games and if you’re the weakest it will hurt you. But then again that demo would have easily got me to buy the game if not from word of mouth to avoid it. I eventually just picked it up to see what the fuss was about since the verdicts were so decisive. But if I wasn’t working for a site like XBLA Fans I would have passed.

Ross Adams: I think it just ends up being a bit of a disservice to the promotion and Microsoft that they’d publish such a poor game, let alone allow it to feature in the flagship XBLA promotion.

Nathan Bowring: Deadlight was my least favorite SoA game this year by far. A huge let-down, and if anyone is interested in playing it they should go no farther than the free trial.

John Laster: I think it definitely had some great ideas. The implementation was just sub par too often for me.

Check back tomorrow for our Hybrid discussion. In the meantime let us know what you thought about Deadlight in the comments, do you agree it was the worst of this years five? Or did you find something to enjoy? Let us know in the comments.