I love a simple concept taken to ludicrous extremes. So when I saw Stop Dead – an FPS where if you stop moving for any reason, you die and have to restart the level – I was downloading the game demo before I could finish reading the description.
The basics are simple: run, jump, and slide to get past obstacles and navigate the level, grab items and throw them at enemies to kill them, and all while you never stop moving. Literally. If you hit a sturdy box while running forward or strafe into a wall, you die. If you hold the slide button down too long and lose momentum, you die. Fall off a building, you (understandably) die.
Your main offensive ability in Stop Dead is picking up objects and launching them at enemies to different effects. Weak objects break after one hit, guns dropped by enemies have a set number of shots before you toss them as a projectile, and red barrels explode. Further complications add to the frantic energy, and trying to pick up objects in the chaos and launch them at enemies is challenging. Ricocheting objects and rag-dolling foes can hit other enemies or civilians, and killing civilians ends your run (and the game calls you a monster).
While you can clear some areas by rushing in and throwing everything you can find at anything that moves, there’s a reward for aiming your shots, working the angles, and not just unleashing projectiles without scoping out who’s in the room. The pace is so quick that taking too much time to aim usually results in getting shot. Thankfully you don’t die in one hit, except from exploding barrels and a few specific attacks, so you don’t have to do a flawless run each time.
Stop Dead’s bright colors and flashy visuals are gorgeous. The UI is stylized and easy to navigate, something I’m finding to be worth praising in the UI hellscape we now occupy. The environments complement the desperate pace set by constantly running, usually being more than a straight line but not being so muddled that you need to stop to get your bearings.
The story presented in the demo is mostly nonexistent. The Steam page says an “AI is hell-bent on destroying its creator and has swept you up in its plans,” but not even that bit of story makes it into the Stop Dead game demo, which took me about an hour to complete. And while my overall impressions have me excited for the full game, a few key issues sometimes stopped the fun dead in its tracks.
I have no idea how much damage different objects in Stop Dead do. During normal gameplay, I couldn’t tell you if throwing a floppy traffic cone does more damage than a stone park bench, because I couldn’t look away from the chaos long enough to measure how much the boss’s health bar went down. The constant visual barrage of information makes it incredibly difficult to know when I got hit or from where, often resulting in death without knowing what killed me. This also made it impossible for me to know if things like sliding and dodging could be effective or if I was doing it wrong.
My eyes were so busy constantly scanning the battlefield for objects to throw and dodging explosions that I’m unsure if enemy attacks just happen or have telegraphing that I missed. Also, the button to slide on the controller, my preferred method of play, didn’t work. Related, I couldn’t remap the controls for the controller or keyboard at the time, so I ended up nearly dislocating my pinky from slamming left Ctrl to slide around the boss arenas. However, an update eventually enabled key rebinding.
Based on what the demo offered, I don’t doubt they could turn this into a full game’s worth of chaotic fun. Though the issues I experienced would need smoothing out to have enough momentum to keep me interested throughout a longer experience, I’m hopeful and will keep an eye out for Dead Stop when it fully releases down the line.
