Still Not Dead

Review

Are you ready to fight for your life? You only have 2 minutes to eliminate a certain number of enemies and escape via one of the back doors before the black skull of death makes its appearance and hunts you down to suck the life out of you for good. It’s going to be the longest 2 minutes of your existence. Oh, by the way there are 5 more stages to go! So, are you still not dead?

Still Not Dead is a fast-paced FPS / retro game where you have to survive a run of six stages to win a game and be rewarded with a new skill skulls to make your next run of 6 even harder, and so on and so forth!

What a surprising little title we have here. As you launch your first run, you’ll be asked to choose one of three blessings available on your screen. It might vary from killing an enemy with a knife in order to receive four extra bullets for your main weapon, to throwing a grenade every time you jump. To be honest with you, I killed myself on few occasions with the grenade blessing and I am not entirely convinced that it’s truly a blessing! In any case, at the start of the next stage you’ll have to choose a curse to keep the equilibrium in terms of difficulty on par. So, stages 1, 3 and 5 will be blessing time and with stages 2, 4 and 6 come the curses.  What I really like with this system is that your next game will be somehow different to you previous attempt, which gives the game great replay ability.

The gameplay is very similar to the iconic game, Doom, both graphically and in the way it plays. Within each map, you’ll have at least three exist doors, three health items, three ammunition boxes and three weapons, with one melee and item icons scattered over it. In the first stage you have to eliminate 18 monsters within the two minute period and escape by making your way to one of the doors to clear the stage. Bear in mind, most of these doors are not easy to find. Most of the time, you‘ll find yourself short by a couple of kills when the two minutes are up and then the mother of all skulls will come after you. Plenty of enemies in these game and all have a different damage ration. The zombies will come at you like flies and you’ll need to hit them at least twice to kill them. The spider cross (that’s what I call them) will take four hits before they die and these little buggers will keep shooting at you at will. The deadly wizard will takes five hits and he, too, will fire at you constantly, but if one of his projectiles manages to hit their target (you), a pink wall will trap you for at least 5 seconds - not a good thing if you are running out of ammo and have a horde of enemies on your tail. The other ones I’ll let you discover for yourself. If you are running out of ammunition, you have a couple of alternatives; either make your way to one of the ammunition boxes on the map, or find a new weapon. Both of these options will cost money, so make sure to take as many bar of golds as possible, which you can find within the maps and occasionally when you kill an enemy. Remember that one bar of gold gives 10 credits and 5 gives 50 credits. I know which one I’d go for! You can run too but that will use your stamina bar very quickly and if you need to jump over a projectile or an obstacle without stamina, it’s not gonna happen! And if you are running low on health, which you will, try to get to the heart icon on the map. If you’re lucky, you might even grab an apple to give you a well needed 30 health points back.

You can destroy all most of the structures within the maps with a large range of weapons, such as guns, uzis, AK47, cannons and many more including the strange cross of God (I can’t remember the name, I was too busy trying to stay alive)!

When you finally nail the last stage, you’ll be awarded a skill skull which will give you two options in terms of difficulty for your second run - how wonderful! This game is crazy!

I really like the pixel artwork and the game runs very well. The soundtrack is upbeat and cool. For the controls you can play either with a gamepad, or the mouse and keyboard. For me, mouse and keyboard is the way to go. One thing I find a bit frustrating is when you need to pick up either an ammunition box or a new weapon; it seems to take several attempts to pick them up.