When I write a bad review, I sometimes begin to feel guilty around the third or fourth paragraph. I mean, I look back over five hundred words of cuss words and slurs against the developer’s parents, lineage, countrymen, pets, hairstylist, and choice of breakfast cereal, and I think, wow, am I really that mad? What did his game actually do to me? It wasn’t exactly as much fun as I’d hoped. Was that really worth plotting out a worldwide apocalypse in detail, just so I could escape living with the memory of having played a couple of shitty levels? So from now on, I’m going to make it a point to say something good about every game in the first paragraph. NeverDead has fantastic graphics. Really, they are ace – better than I expected.
Which doesn’t matter, because everything else about this game is the absolute pits. Really, I can’t believe I just wrote all that mealy-mouthed crap in defense of the feelings of the people who made a game this abysmal. Worldwide apocalypse? I would wreck whole galaxies to get revenge on these knuckleheads just for NeverDead’s first level.
NeverDead is a game about a guy who can’t die, which is a shame, because you want him to on so many levels. Want him to, because he’s a cheesy hack of main character with no personality, zero likability, and enough bad one-liners to mandate a firing squad all by themselves. Want him to, because when you’ve staggered around a level looking for your own corpse parts for the hundred and fortieth time, you feel as annoyed with him just for existing and putting you in the situation of controlling his stupid ass as you do with anyone else. Want him to, because if he just would, then you could stop playing and it would all finally end.
Because you can’t die, when you take damage, your limbs fall off instead. How quaint that sounds before it actually happens to you. Throughout this game you’ll be losing body parts left and right like there’s no tomorrow, and that means you’ve got to stumble around and find them so they can be reattached. In a couple of situations, it becomes possible to be so separated from your legs or arms that the game becomes unwinnable, which is just below ‘filling the shrink-wrapped game box with
Sarin gas’ on the list of things you should never, ever do as a developer. More than once you’ll be reduced to just a head, rolling around, trying and failing to connect with your neck socket in a way the game deems acceptable for reattachment. If I can say one more positive thing about NeverDead, it’s that the fine folks at Konami were too drunk or brain-damaged to consider letting the head separate into its own constituent parts. That would without a doubt have resulted in the first real-world violence directly correlated with playing a video game.
There is no plot to speak of in NeverDead. It doesn’t think it needs one. There’s you, a female sidekick/object of sexual frustration who exists to have boobs and an outfit that shows them off, and a hundred million distended, bulbous, typically demonic enemies to slaughter again and again until the very act of pressing a button makes you want to throw up so hard you turn yourself inside-out. NeverDead wants to be one of those wacky run & gun 3PS titles like Devil May Cry or Saints Row, but fails utterly in large part because the mechanics of playing it preclude the very idea of fun. The camera is a train wreck of jittery fumbling and jagged speed changes, like if Cloverfield had been shot on someone’s third day of going cold turkey. You can choose to wield bladed weapons or blast away with dual pistols, but switching between the two fighting styles is about as smooth as the North Atlantic in November. The cliched and irritating enemies spawn ad infinitum, and are only slightly less annoying than the boss battles, which rank as some of the worst ever conceived by man, coupling the least enjoyable parts of NeverDead’s dilapidated combat system with pit-jumping and platforming that the insufficiently polished control mechanisms make truly maddening. They try to shove the half-digested remains of the disjointed and hackneyed story at you in the last quarter of the game, but by then you won’t care, because you’ll almost certainly be hitting your real head against the TV in a vain attempt to get it to detach.
If you can’t tell by now, NeverDead is a rotten game. Don’t play it even as a joke. If you come across a copy of this game, you’re morally obligated to destroy it on sight. If the world ends in 2012, it won’t have anything to do with the Mayans; the suffering caused by too many people loading NeverDead will, if left unchecked, eventually crack the earth’s crust in towo.