LET IT DIE
Death is not the end in Grasshopper’s tower of terror
Gore! What is it good for? Splashing around in this survival-action game, for one thing.
Killer 7. Lollipop Chainsaw. Shadows Of The Damned. Killer Is Dead. In terms of quality, you might politely describe Grasshopper Manufacture’s back catalogue as patchy. But does this lot know how to name a game! Let It Die is the latest addition to the list; like its stablemates, it sounds like the title of the latest album from a hard-working post-punk band. Indeed, Grasshopper has often borrowed the ‘punk’ label for its games, and it’s an excellent fit. The studio makes ropey, ramshackle, edgily countercultural games, and has never seemed particularly bothered about how they sell. That’s still the case with Let It Die, even though it’s Grasshopper’s first game for new publisher and parent company, GungHo Online Entertainment. GungHo makes one of the most lucrative mobile games in the world: Puzzle & Dragons recently crossed the 100-million-download mark. Yet Grasshopper’s punk spirit survives in this deeply weird, and weirdly compulsive, game.
Let It Die is a free-to-play sort-of-roguelike in which you climb a gore-slathered tower one procedurally-generated floor at a time. Starting at level one and wearing only your pants, you’ll scavenge and use a succession of ultraviolent, often comical, improvised weapons (a power drill; a pickaxe; a firework launcher) against a procession of grotesque enemies. Some are the reanimated corpses of travellers who failed to complete the journey; others have been mutated, the apparent result of a botched experiment.
PUMP ‘N’ GRIND
All enemies fight in much the same way. Grasshopper owes a clear debt to FromSoftware here: the combat is pure Dark Souls, or at least a slightly rickety interpretation of its magical formula. It’s a game of patience, of dancing in and out of your opponent’s range in order to bait an attack, then punish it when it misses. Similarly, your actions are limited by a stamina
system, denoted not by a HUD meter but your avatar’s heart, which beats louder, and visibly enlarges and changes colour as you attack. Overdo it, and you’ll slump over, unable to move, leaving yourself defenceless. Often, doing so means it’s curtains. Enemies hit hard, and while stunlock is an advantage when you land the first hit, when the fist is in the other face you’re in very real danger of losing your entire health bar.
This sounds annoying, and often it is – but it’s supposed to be. As the game’s title suggests, death is a driving factor in Let It Die’s design. Fall in combat, and you’re faced with a choice. You can continue, reviving yourself on the spot, by spending Death Metal: a premium currency that is available in small amounts by playing the game, and in larger quantities by getting your wallet out. Alternatively, you can buy your character back using KillCoins, a freely available in-game currency. You needn’t do this immediately – they’ll be sent, unusable, to a freezer in the waiting room, your base of operations at the bottom of the tower – but until you do a version of that character will patrol the floor you died on as a Hater, an AI-controlled, powerful fighter. Kill that, and you can have your character back for free… albeit without their Death Bag, which held all the juicy wares you’d acquired during your run.
LIVE OR LET DIE
While the cynical way to look at this is to dismiss it as a means of sucking money out of you, it’s actually the beating, bloody heart of the game, and never an easy choice. After all, leaving your character to become what the game calls ‘Haterfied’ might mean losing an amazing weapon, or a blueprint for crafting one, or some rare materials you’ve been hunting down for hours.
Saying “no” means starting another fighter at level one, using only the gear you can afford to buy from the vendor in the waiting room, or had previously put in storage. And if you do decide to start over, do you take the elevator up to the floor you died on, even though you’re wearing nothing but undies and a traffic cone for a helmet, and are wielding a hammer about to break? Or do you play it safe and start on a slower floor? This gets right to the heart of how free-to-play games are monetised – you’re not paying for a game-breaking advantage, but simply to save yourself some time and inconvenience. But when the results are this mechanically fascinating, you can’t complain.
That’s okay! Because there’s a lot of other stuff you can complain about. The first is that this is an always-online game: fair enough, but only if the servers are rock-solid. They’re not, and because Let It Die counts any attempt to quit the game as a death unless you’re in the waiting room, if a server somewhere falls over, you might lose a lot of progress. Even when the servers are behaving, I suffer
“A VERSION OF YOUR DEAD CHARACTER WILL PATROL THE FLOOR YOU DIED ON.”
a few deaths that feel unfair – perhaps as a consequence of the aggressive focus on stunlock, or the game deciding to dodge the wrong way, or of an offscreen enemy hitting me with a projectile I don’t see coming. Often, all three at once. The tower itself’s a bit bland, too, a consequence of its layout being procedurally generated from recognisable geometric parts. It’s like a game made entirely of Bloodborne’s chalice dungeons – fit for purpose, but I often find myself wishing for something with a little bit more personality.
However, you’ll rarely feel frustrated. You can always get a dead character back, and even if you choose not to you’ll still have made progress – finding an elevator back to the waiting room, perhaps, or killing a boss, or climbing a few floors higher. Progress often means more ways to play: reaching certain floors unlocks new character classes, for instance. And there’s always something else to do. Perhaps you could go back to an earlier level to seek out crafting materials that only drop on certain floors or from specific enemies. Or you could delve into Tokyo Death Metro, a complex mix of real-time, asynchronous and automated multiplayer raids on other players’ waiting rooms, defended by their unused characters.
So, is Let It Die unapologetically punk? Absolutely. But there’s a level of complexity and polish that belies the lo-fi visuals, the gore, the bonkers story and the motley crew of nutbags that you encounter. Under new ownership, Grasshopper has – dare we say it? – grown up.
VERDICT
It’s lovably shonky in the classic Grasshopper style, but this is a game of surprisingly layered depth and subtlety, and the studio’s best game in yonks. Nathan Brown