Previews
[Early Access Impressions] Classic ‘Fallout’ Meets Flesh n’ Puke Gross Out in Indie RPG ‘Death Trash’
When Fallout 3 was announced, I was one of the many people who were hesitant about the change in perspective for the series. There was something about the look and feel of those old isometric games that captured the grimy, icky apocalypse they were going for that wasn’t quite as appealing when rendered in crisper graphics that you could explore in first person. While I have grown to enjoy the later Fallout games, I’m always hoping something out there can recapture the feeling of the originals. Enter Death Trash.
Much like Fallout, Death Trash begins with a brief tutorial before exiling you from an underground bunker and letting you loose in a flesh-covered wasteland. Skinless mutants wander alongside your standard complement of raiders and weirdos, and all the “normal” people you find feed on the strange meat that mysteriously grows from the earth. It’s a decidedly gross world, where you’re likely to run into a wayward nudist or a place called “Puke Bar,” but the pixelated art style keeps it from being disgustingly off putting.
Death Trash ostensibly lets you build your character’s stats to fit your playstyle, allowing you to put points in skills like animalism, cybertech and occultism. These options seem to be padded out by an unnecessary granularity in the combat stats (such as blunt vs bladed melee weapons), and the social stats seem underutilized at the moment. This seems to stem from an unfortunate case of trying to mimic the minutiae of Fallout without consideration if the game needs it or not. Since combat is so skill-based, the effect of the combat stats isn’t quite as immediately evident, aside from preventing you from using certain weapons. It’s not quite as robust as it appears to be at first glance, but the game is in Early Access, so that part of the game could be developed further as the project progresses.
The real-time combat is fast and desperate, giving you options to fight either with melee or ranged weapons. Timing is everything as you try to dance around your enemy’s reload window and sneak in your strikes before you have to dodge roll away from theirs. Ammo is scarce, especially before you can purchase the crafting recipes for bullets and shells, so you’ll find yourself leaning more on swords and clubs instead of shotguns and rifles. A basic stealth system helps you start off encounters on the right foot, but you’ll still need good reflexes and smart resource management to make it through fights. It’s a fun bit of mental math you have to do when confronted with an encounter; is this group worth using some of my limited bullets on, or should I try to carefully pick them off with my sword? Cyberware can also give you skills to help out in encounters, but those too are limited in their usage.
Dungeons in Death Trash can be pretty challenging, especially in the early stages before you’ve found or purchased better equipment. These dungeons feel a lot like the Fallout formula, running you through mazes that are peppered with lore notes to find between enemy encounters. Liberal use of quicksave keeps it from being too frustrating, but expect to die a lot in the early going when fighting bigger groups of marauders.
For a game that’s trying to be aggressively unpleasant, the world draws you in with intriguing and bizarre details that give Death Trash its own unique identity, even when compared to its influences. One of the skills you start off with is “puke,” which you can, oddly enough, use to reactivate cyborgs and machines on a couple occasions. The strange flesh throughout the landscape not only gives a good visual flair, but creates an interesting mystery. No one knows where it comes from, but everyone seems super comfortable eating it (it’s even used as your primary method of healing yourself). As you progress, you learn that you have the ability to communicate with the meat and the network of beings connected to it. Proper nouns like “Worm Shaman” and “Flesh Nexus” drew me into its mythology and left me wanting more.
In addition to investigating that overall mystery, you’re also given extra sidequests that let you learn more about the characters that inhabit the various towns and locations throughout the world. Most of them so far have been pretty easy fetch quests, but they give you good reasons to move around the map and fully investigate the areas. As you are travelling the overworld map, you can run into random encounters, but those are generally just simple combat encounters or quick character interactions. They make the world feel a bit more alive and dynamic, though ultimately don’t add too much.
While there’s a lot to love about Death Trash right now, it’s definitely a game that’s early in its Early Access run. After only about three or four hours of playing, I already ran into a message saying “WIP Quest – Come Back Later.” The core loop of exploring and combat is satisfying, and the world is already, excuse the pun, fleshed out, but the lack of content may be a reason to hold off on purchasing. For me, I was glad to jump into Early Access to help this small project out, but I might put it down until the full release so I can experience it in its full glory when it’s ready.
Death Trash is out now in Early Access on PC.
In the past 10 years since the release of DOOM (2016), we’ve seen a surprising amount of evolution on the core concept of the series. DOOM brought the series back with a clever push-forward combat system with a glory kill system that forced you to stay in the fray. DOOM Eternal added wrinkles to the combat by giving you tools that exploited specific enemy weaknesses, while also increasing the focus on precise platforming and narrative.
DOOM: The Dark Ages slowed things down a bit without decreasing the intensity, giving you a shield that added defensive verbs to your arsenal in a way that allowed you to be even more aggressive. It’s very clear throughout all these titles that id Software is very thoughtful about the ways they try to replicate the experience of original games in a modern context.
Recently, id hosted a virtual event to show off the latest iteration of the DOOM series, Revelations, an upcoming DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages, which they promise will be a celebration of the entire series. Set after the conclusion of Dark Ages, the Doomslayer finds himself trapped in a purgatory, forcing him to rip and tear his way out of a prison of his own mind with the help of a mysterious ally. While they emphasized that this would be a narratively pivotal chapter for the story of the Doomslayer, they were keeping details under wraps, instead focusing on the level structure and combat feel of the DLC.
A More Demanding Challenge
One thing they wanted to make clear about Revelations is that they are going to be pushing the level of difficulty higher than the base game, challenging even the most seasoned series veterans. Game Director Hugo Martin wanted to emphasize that they’ve been listening to fans, so while it will be more challenging, the ramp-up of that difficulty is more gradual than in the DOOM Eternal Ancient Gods DLCs. The difficulty and accessibility sliders from the base game will all be sticking around, so you’ll be able to customize your challenge level however you want, if you find the game too punishing.
In order to prepare you to meet this challenge, they’ve introduced a new weapon, the chain spear. This can be swapped into your left hand, where you also use the shield from the base game, giving you a new suite of options for your tactical arsenal. Not only does it allow you to parry projectiles like the shield, but it also adds a grappling hook and dash to your toolkit, giving you ways to move around the battlefield quicker than before.
If you’re more comfortable with the shield, that will still be available to you, but Martin said by the end of the campaign you’ll need to be integrating the spear into your repertoire, as upgrades make it essential to your survival.
While id still wants to retain the slower, more brutal feeling of Dark Ages, they’re hoping that the spear will feel like strapping a jet engine to a monster truck, combining the best of the last two games into one violent package. It’s hard to say how this will feel without getting my hands on it, but a lot of the new skills appeared to add a dynamism to the encounters, particularly the clever-looking orbit ability that allows you to attach yourself to a monster and revolve around them, almost like an aerial version of the z-targeting lock-on from Metroid Prime.
The modern DOOM series has always been about finding just the right balance of giving you enough tools to make combat both tactical and reflex-based without making too much complexity as to overwhelm you. It looks to me like the chain spear will be a solid addition that adds exciting ways to close the distance or get around an arena, rather than forcing you to remember the utility of each weapon like DOOM Eternal did.
Six Levels and an Endgame Built for Experts
Revelations will feature six levels, including the hub, and will provide about 10 to 12 hours of content, roughly the same size as the two-part Ancient Gods DLC from Eternal. As Martin explained it, this will be divided between the main campaign and the endgame content, with the main campaign taking up about 60% of the overall runtime. After completing the main campaign missions, you’ll be given access to a wide variety of challenges that will continue to increase in difficulty until you unlock what Martin called the Uberboss. I’m curious to see how substantial this endgame content feels, as it sounds like it will take you on new paths through the previous levels rather than providing completely new content, but id seems confident that the challenge and spectacle of these encounters are going to be worth it.
The team said that exploration is going to be one of the highlights of the DLC, which is a fun prospect for me. The best DOOM levels are the ones that are littered with satisfying secrets, and they’ve promised Revelations will be full of them, including hidden recreations of classic levels. After hearing fan feedback for DOOM: The Dark Ages, they decided not to mark these secrets on the map, allowing you the satisfaction of finding them yourself. Every level is designed to be fairly maze-like, requiring you to retrace your steps as the campaign goes on.
There’s even the promise of Metroidvania-like exploration in the hub level, opening up more and more of the space as you gain abilities. The dragon and the mech will not be showing up in the DLC, but leaving them behind feels like a good decision to me, as they exhausted those gimmicks in the base game.
Smarter Enemies, Tougher Fights
Over the course of the presentation, they showed off a few more enemy options that are being added into the mix. In addition to an all-new Wizard enemy type, there are variants of enemies seen in the base game featuring new behaviors that change up the encounters in meaningful ways. Importantly, they said that there would be a focus on giving more enemies evasive AI, pulling you around the arena space to keep you from hunkering down in one place. DOOM has always been a fast-paced game of tactical chess, requiring you to scan the battlefield and prioritize the various targets, so hopefully adding more enemy behaviors to the mix will make for a fun way to add challenge to their already challenging combat.
In addition to the difficult endgame, id is releasing a 3.0 version of the Ripatorium, the customizable endless mode that was seen in the Dark Ages. This will add new maps, new levels, and deeper customization to the fan-favorite mode, allowing you to run through some particularly diabolical encounters. While I personally would prefer more focus on the main campaign of the game, it seems they are trying to cater to people who want more ways to push the challenge of the series as far as they can, and Ripatorium 3.0 looks like the culmination of that effort.
Final Verdict
The DOOM series is so much about how it feels in the hands, and while I didn’t get to experience that, they closed the presentation with a combat sizzle reel that looked like an exciting evolution of Dark Ages, a game that I thought felt great to play. The new grapple function of the spear allowed the arenas to have a bit more verticality than those found in the base game, and the visual design of the enemies remained consistently readable, allowing you to understand the encounter at a glance. The orbit ability in particular looked fun as hell, allowing you to dynamically move around the environment while still staying focused on offense. It’s looking extremely promising, but it’s impossible to judge until I get to play it myself.
After experimenting with the formula for over the last decade, id is hoping that Revelations is the culmination of the series from both a mechanical and narrative standpoint. They closed by saying that Revelations is to The Dark Ages what DOOM Eternal was to DOOM (2016), which is both exciting and worrying for me. In my mind, there’s a dial they’ve been tuning over the course of this reboot series. The dial felt perfect in DOOM, then turned too far up for me with Eternal, before reaching a great point with The Dark Ages, though not quite as perfect as where it started.
Time will tell where it lands on this spectrum, but the new chain spear seems like it’s going to be just as welcome an addition as the shield was in The Dark Ages. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait too long to find out.
DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations will be available for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and the PC via Steam on July 7.
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