I wanted to like Deathbound. A party-based Souls-like is an inventive premise, one which Deathbound demonstrably put a ton of care and attention into. There are plenty of cool ideas on a systems level that make the party-based structure work. Unfortunately, the overall execution is rough – and not in a way that’s easy to endure.
How Deathbound works is that you have a party of four characters, each with their own play style and their own pool of stamina and health. One is the standard balanced melee character wielding a sword and shield. Another is a sort of rogue equipped with a dagger and a crossbow for a mix of quick strikes and ranged attacks. You have a mage who has to manage heat build up lest he explode from casting too many spells quickly, and then a couple other melee fighters with a different proficiency, one favoring speed and the other raw defense.
The combat is built around building “sync,” which is done by attacking enemies and dodging attacks. A perfectly timed dodge will build that gauge faster, encouraging you to take some risk. Once you have at least one bar full, you can morph into another character after a dodge or mid-combo. This has the benefit of allowing you to easily swap to another character with more stamina, which is good because each character individually doesn’t have much to spare.
This is complicated by health and stamina being tied together, however. As you lose health, so too do you lose stamina. Furthermore, your main renewable source of healing will steal a small amount of health from inactive party members to heal whoever uses it. It’s a clever idea that adds a unique form of friction to traditional Souls-like design. It serves the party-based structure well by ensuring you have to use everyone to their fullest instead of relying on one or two at most.
The core problem, however, is that Deathbound just doesn’t feel good to play. There’s a constant stiffness to everything that makes every action feel off, nor particularly satisfying. Attacks feel weak and inept. The lack of any reaction from foes on hit contributes to this, but it’s largely a problem of everything missing that sense of oomph. The most it gets is some slow-down on a perfect dodge or a fully charged morph-strike, which works for the dodge since it’s very brief, but disrupts combat flow and is ultimately annoying when you get hit before your strike connects.
Even performing sync actions can feel awkward, though. Numerous times I would try to use them and nothing would happen, even if I was mashing the button. Worst case I would swap party members after an attack had recovered, leaving me wide open for an attack.
Deathbound broadly feels like a Souls-like that wants to emphasize a slower, more deliberate and defensive play given how stringent stamina usage is and how fatal taking a couple hits can be. It feels like a much more cautious game. But then has these elements that feel like they encourage a more aggressive approach, to take risks and keep the pressure on instead of playing carefully. This is especially apparent in encounter design given how often it likes to toss groups of enemies at you or otherwise tanky opponents who don’t stagger easily (not that it does much).
It feels like you should be playing slow and safe, but doing so always put me at a regular disadvantage. Blocking attacks (if the character can), unless perfectly timed, will deal damage, which adds up very fast given how health and stamina are linked. Conversely, playing aggressively let me get through fights quickly, but effectively forced me to use my party as a bunch of glass cannons. If I took more than one hit, I was likely to be in critical condition unless the active character had enough defense to absorb another couple of strikes.
This is all compounded little things like attacks randomly phasing through enemies mid-combo (I had at least five separate instances of that happen) and how often attacks get caught on geometry (more times than I can count), a particularly common problem in tight spaces, which the game loves to use as part its level design. It makes fighting even the most basic foes frustrating.
Deathbound reminds me of last year’s Lords of the Fallen reboot. A game with some fun ideas and clear thought and care put into them, but ultimately undone by a bunch of little issues that prevent it from actually feeling good to play.
Callum Rakestraw is the Reviews Editor at Entertainium. You can follow him on Cohost @crakestraw.
