Dead Ground

Genre: Tower Defense / Two-Stick Shooter / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Dead Ground, released on Nintendo Switch in 2021 and in early access on PC, is a game that combines elements of a Tower Defense game with a Two-Stick Shooter and a Roguelike. This game takes place in a post-apocalyptic landscape seemingly reminiscent of something like Mad Max but without the cars, where players play a leader of a nomadic group of survivors looking to scavenge the area for supplies and fend off groups of hostile raiders.

The presentation here isn’t very impressive, and in some ways it’s outright odd. It features cartoony 2D visuals that don’t fit the game’s violent theme, and the cartoony nature of them doesn’t even help to make them more easily distinguishable with their tiny size and muted color palette. This is paired with an odd and eclectic soundtrack that mixes various styles of music, including some oddly jazzy themes given the game’s topic matter. I kinda’ feel like whoever was in charge of the art direction here was very confused about their vision for this game.

I suppose the gameplay is at least something I wouldn’t say is confused as well – this is actually a pretty good combination of elements, at least in theory. Players build survivor camps to defend against invaders seeking to pilfer your precious water supply, and must weigh the water expense of those camps against the cost of letting invaders through and having that water pilfered. Also, the Roguelike elements add some excellent feelings of discovery when you manage to get a really nice gun or some other unique upgrade. And at least in theory, the Two-Stick Shooter mechanics pair well with the Tower Defense style of gameplay – we’ve already seen these two gameplay styles paired perfectly in games like X-Morph Defense.

However, given that I had to qualify that last paragraph multiple times with the words “in theory”, you’ve probably caught on that in practice this doesn’t work out all that well. The problem is that while these are some elements that make perfect sense to combine, none of these elements is done especially well in and of itself. At least initially, players don’t have many options for different types of towers for the “tower defense” part of the game, and are given little indication about the benefits and detriments to those options. The Two-Stick Shooter elements are hampered by some torturously slow character movement and a lack of variety in weapon choices early on. And the Roguelike elements are undermined by a lack of variety in the various upgrades you can get.

One other thing I feel deserves mention here – I had problems with this game crashing, and the tutorial didn’t explain some of the game’s basic concepts very well. To give you an idea, it took me a while flailing at buttons on the controller before realizing that building a tower required being on a specific spot, pressing the A button to open the menu, and then pressing a direction on the D-Pad (not either control stick) to select the option. This is the sort of stuff that one would hope got addressed in basic game testing, and as a result, this game seems somewhat sloppy, even beyond its odd presentation.

As a result, Dead Ground is a Tower Defense game that has a lot of great ideas, but that unfortunately fails in pretty much every area of its execution. I absolutely love the thinking behind combining elements of Tower Defense with Two-Stick Shooters and Roguelikes, but at this point I’m going to have to be satisfied with waiting to see those ideas better realized in some other game. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a great Tower Defense game on Nintendo Switch, or a great Two-Stick Shooter, or a great Roguelike, you have tons of other options, some that even combine two of those genres, at least. You’re better off going with one of them.

tl;dr – Dead Ground is a game that combines Tower Defense, Two-Stick Shooter, and Roguelike elements, a pairing that works well in theory, but in practice simply can’t get past the fact that this game fails in the execution of every single element of the game. I commend the game for having some great ideas, but unfortunately those are ideas it just doesn’t get to work properly.

Grade: C-

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