Dead Party is a game that’s an unusual but fun blend of third-person action, barricade building, and rock music. Let’s find out whether this undead party is worth attending after the trailer!
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Halloween Has Gone Terribly Wrong
The story, if we can call it that, takes us to Shady Hill, a peaceful little town where Halloween celebrations take an unexpected turn when UFOs appear in the sky and the dead begin climbing out of their graves. Four rather unlikely heroes find themselves responsible for stopping the invasion. The aliens, however, have picked the wrong town to mess with, because its residents are quite resourceful when it comes to fighting zombies and other creatures of the night.
Dead Party is a successor to Dead Block. As such, it follows a similar approach to zombie defense. Shooting enemies is possible, yes, but we’re also expected to prepare the buildings we’re defending and prevent the undead from getting inside. This involves smashing furniture and other objects to collect materials, which can then be used to construct barricades and slow down approaching zombies.
Each level has a different layout, and you need to pay attention to entrances and possible chokepoints. Barricades will buy you valuable time, and you’ll also get to place traps to help deal with zombies attempting to break through. It’s also possible to find and unlock weapons to handle enemies that get past our defenses. However, the game features different zombie types with their own behaviors, so we can’t really rely on the same defensive approach every time.
As we mentioned, we can choose between four playable characters. Each of them is equipped with a guitar that produces a different effect. There’s a nurse whose music heals herself and nearby teammates. There’s also a diner cook who uses his bass to freeze zombies. The other two are equally interesting. We have a police officer who can set enemies on fire and a construction worker who’s great at damaging zombies and nailing them to the ground.
These abilities are particularly useful when considering how to defend a building, but they work best when we’re part of a group that knows how to cooperate. It’s great to see one player temporarily stop approaching zombies while another is barricading windows and we’re doing our best to keep everyone alive. If we’re playing solo or end up in a poorly coordinated group, things can go wrong fast, and then not even the additional perks that come from unlocked equipment can save us.
Endless Fighting
The game offers a Story Mode and a customizable Arcade Mode, with four different defensive objectives. In Showtime, we gather stage equipment and use music against the undead. Fuel Run, on the other hand, has us powering generators to transmit radio waves that interfere with the alien invasion. These modes are quite fun to lose yourself in, especially when you have some good, positive people by your side. There’s more, though!
Skull Cannon is probably the strangest of the bunch, as it requires collecting skulls from defeated zombies and using them as ammunition to shoot UFOs out of the sky. Until this point, we never knew that zombie skulls would make perfectly acceptable anti-aircraft ammunition. Finally, Horde Mode removes the other objectives and challenges us to survive for as long as possible. We never lasted long, not because of any broken game mechanics, far from it. We were just too busy running around like crazy, trying to do everything, while someone was too busy chatting with his lovey-dovey (looking at you, Matey!).
We’re grateful that Dead Party supports solo play, but this game is at its best in one of the four-player cooperative modes where, as explained above, friends can divide defensive responsibilities. To make matters even more approachable, both local and online co-op are supported, and the devs have also included AI bots for Story and Arcade modes, so when you’re friends or, even worse, relatives stab you in the back, you can always rely on the good old AI.
Best with Buddies!
We particularly like how the game encourages us to do more than shoot everything that moves, even if our carefully planned defenses can fall apart quite quickly. There’s fun to be had when playing alone, but we’d recommend inviting a few friends over.
Our score: 8/10
- Platform: PC (Steam, Epic Games Store)
- Developer: Radiation Blue
- Publisher: Snail Games USA
- Genre: Action, Zombie Defense
- Modes: Single-player, Local and Online Co-op (up to 4 players)
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