Death's Gambit

Death’s Gambit wholly embraces the Dark Souls way of giving players just enough leeway to barely survive against unrelenting adversity, for good and ill. A compelling story, smooth and frantic melee combat, and a robustly grim 2D world come together to form a game that’s wholly unafraid to embrace the Souls-like moniker.

Death's Gambit is only a souls-like? At first glance the answer is definitely yes but it is also a lot more. White Rabbit manage to create a great but nevertheless fragile game which despite the flaws and the lapse of taste in some situations deserves your attention.

That Death’s Gambit is beautiful and rewarding enough to be worth the struggle is what makes it a more successful homage to Dark Souls than most. It’s not the most creative game, but that doesn’t matter when so few developers are capable of pulling this kind of trick off.

Death's Gambit has potential and an impressive visual style, but an unpolished control scheme and combat tends to make things a bit uncomfortable in some occasions. There's potential with room to improvement.

Death's Gambit is a decent soul-like 2D ARPG, and it has a strong art style, interesting story, and various gameplay.

Death's Gambit is buggy, unpolished, frustrating, and derivative. At the same time, it features some interesting bosses and unexpected storytelling tricks. It's sure to be a divisive game, but you may be won over by the atmosphere its fantastic art, music, and voice acting create, if you can overlook its flaws.

With its enjoyable story, melancholic atmosphere, competent gameplay and outstanding soundtrack, Death's Gambit is an enjoyable take on the Dark Souls series formula. Some flaws, such as floaty movement, weird hitboxes on select weapon types, and some mediocre bosses, however, prevent the game from being a masterpiece.

It remains a challenging game, with some unexpected and surprising jolts, and a good background quality. If the team had applied more we would have had a worthy "rival" of Salt & Sanctuary, while at the moment the product of Ska Studio surpasses this Death's Gambit at every level.

There are moments when Death’s Gambit is a really good game that intelligently copies Souls and the likes, but to truly enjoy it you need to accept it as a collage of inspirations which doesn’t allow original ideas to shine. [11/2018, p.74]

It offers a challenging, story-driven platforming experience that will reward the patient and methodical.

I like a lot of what Death’s Gambit has to offer, but controlling it is vexatious. The game does a decent job establishing a small, captivating story wrapped in a melancholically exquisite world. I wish Death’s Gambit found more of its own voice, since it truly does shine in the moments it tries something new and refreshing. Although it doesn’t necessarily take the concept of adapting the 2D Souls formula to the next level, Death’s Gambit is another solid shot at it.

A very blunt attempt to fuse two beloved games, Dark Souls and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, into one challenging 2D action-platformer. Developer White Rabbit shows a strong understanding of what made each of them great but glosses over fundamentals that all great games need, such as responsive controls and an understandable game world, and falls short of its promise.

The freedom, and the constant sense that I’d be surprised when I turned the next corner, somewhat smoothed over the frustrations of Death’s Gambit, but it’d be a stretch to say I enjoyed it as a whole. Figuring out the best strategy for each boss fight is satisfying, but actually beating them isn’t fun enough to justify the pain of battling the stingy stamina system. Throwing myself at the same boss 29 times in a row just wasn’t quite worth the hassle.

Surely, Death’s Gambit is a beautiful game. Music is great, story-telling is great, and there a significant challenge. But Sorun’s animations and many glitches are too much to bear.

Death's Gambit is an enjoyable experience, but with the shortcomings it has and the lack of distinguishing elements it's decent at best.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has proven to all players, that it doesn´t need Hollywood faces in the story to attract players, because it’s completely fine with its online entertainment. Call of Duty is definitely going to stay with us for a couple more weeks. [Issue#290]