Drawn to Death is utter garbage.
From the time I spent with it, hands-on, at E3 this year, I’m wholly confident the third-person shooter, straight from the mind of David Gaffe, is a game that should have been released years and years ago. It seems to be all-style and with little-substance, a shooter that features crudely hand-drawn characters duking it out in a hand-drawn environment and recycling so many memes and clichéd crap that it’ll make your head spin.
It honestly should have been released in the original PlayStation era, where gimmicks were perhaps enough to justify the existence of your game.
In our hands-on time, four human-controlled opponents were let loose in a deathmatch-style game. The map was closed-quarters, perfect for the amount of people playing, but even with a lot of action stemming from that, I was bored. Weaponry, largely, felt the same. There was plenty of verticality in the map, but a super-high double jump made everything easy to reach and kind of pointless.
It was easy enough to pick up the game’s controls, and even easier to get used to aiming and shooting, but I never felt a wave of accomplishment when I killed an enemy. Worse yet, I scowled at the screen whenever I was felled, not at my lack of skill or the finesse of my opponent, but rather because of a stupid-ass ‘sleeping kid and lame devil’ meme that popped up.
Every. Single. Time.
The only really good thing I enjoyed about my time with Drawn to Death was one particular power-up that changed my normal, gun-style weaponry to what appeared to be an amputee, armed with an endless supply of volleyballs; on command, my new weapon-slash-partner would lob said volleyball with expert-like precision. I even giggled once.
The problem is, I get the distinct impression Gaffe designed this game thinking I would be chortling all the way through. That’s never going to happen. It’s try-hard, too simplistic, and I’m left to wonder if the demo we played is truly representative of the overall experience we’re meant to have with the shooter.
Talking of gimmicks, it’s hard to deny that Twisted Metal fits into that category I described above – something that might have ridden on the coattails of gritty 90s premises to come out of it all as a beloved franchise. In this day and age, Drawn to Death is laughable and hopefully, very soon forgotten.
Unless it’s got some amazing ace card up its sleeve, Drawn to Death is definitely a game you’ll want to avoid.
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