NeverDead Review [PS3]

rating:1.5

NeverDead has a wonderful, completely bonkers central premise, which redefines the established face of regeneration allowing some seriously gory, logic-defying behaviour, like removing limbs and using them as weapons, bowling with your own head and everything in between. But the execution, and the entertainment factor never quite match up to the ideas behind the game. This Constantine on acid story is the fruit of a collaboration between Metal Gear Solid's Shinta Nojiri and English studio Rebellion, and follows Bryce Boltzmann - a demon-hunting immortal, cursed to live forever - to be a demon in body but not in mind. The plot basically facilitates Boltzmann's supernatural abilities - rather than die from damage incurred in battle and then regenerating without effort in the same vein as most other modern FP shooters, NeverDead asks the player to work for their health, collecting limbs and occasionally employing them for things other than their primary purpose. And it is an interesting conceit: it's just a shame the developers failed in almost every way attempting to match the quality of the gameplay to the quality of their idea. Destruction isn't a problem, both the idea of the damage mechanism on Boltzmann , and the engine that governs environmental, but the combat engine is pretty much broken from top to bottom. Aiming your gun ranges from laboured to completely unresponsive, and firing it on targets has uninspiring results - with the damage quota for each shot painfully and unrealistically low. And as for the sword - the mechanism is governed by a move sequence that must have looked good on paper (shoulder button held, slash movement with analogue) that quickly outstays its welcome and becomes too much of a chore in the heat of battle. The reason I qualified that the idea of Boltzmann's bodily destruction isn't a problem, is because the execution of the gimmick doesn't really work. While limbs falling off and requiring collection in extreme combat sounds like a good thing, having them brushed off at the slightest contact is less satisfying, and it feels a lot like the game is punishing, rather than entertaining the player for trying to do anything. Level design is middling and unmemorable, the script is frankly woeful and characters are poorly conceived. The script could have been the rescue-point: with a good enough story, or even self-aware enough dialogue, there could have been a glimmer of enjoyment to be had. But this is writing to the lowest common denominator, and the player comes off the worst. It's a game that won't leave any kind of mark, apart from future recollection of how silly the central concept was. And even then, it will be a memory marked by the revelation that it was never quite as cool an idea as first imagined: almost every time immortality has appeared in popular culture, it has been presented as cool, and there was some mangled suggestion that the main character was going to be a wise-cracking Constantine variant. But NeverDead achieved neither of those slight promises, and the excitement I felt at being able to play something so gleefully lunatic from the launch trailer quickly evaporated into apathy and downright antipathy eventually. Overall, NeverDead's greatest problem is the disparity between idea and execution: underneath all of the off-putting gameplay and silliness, there is a fine game trying to burst out. But for every moment of innovation, and flash of promise, there is something glaringly wrong in the simplest elements of the game. It seems, unfortunately, that NeverDead's central premise that immortality is bad was wholly, and unintentionally appropriate.

NeverDead is available to buy now on XBox 360 and PS3.