It’s amusing enough, and younger gamers will probably revel in the chance to tackle opponents in such a collaborative manner.
The co-op mode presented is a transient distraction, Sparkles the Wizard, DeathSpank’s spell-throwing buddy, doing his best to break a model that was admittedly already creaking. You don’t have to wrestle with the endless permutations found in the veritable smörgåsbord of armaments and doohickeys, a reality that suggests Hothead have produced a well-wrought game if perhaps an unnecessarily intricate one. It’s as if the creators have intentionally constructed a game that is both instantly accessible and friendly for a more casual crowd while also engrafting a clockwork of statistics driven complexity just beneath the veneer a convoluted puzzle you can experience at your own discretion or alternatively choose to put little weight in. The game even tells you when you’re using an ineffective weapon against a foe, a handy “Inert” message popping up signalling the need to switch tactic. Eons can be spent customising DeathSpank with various weapons and defensive configurations, but as long as you assign corndogs and nachos to the appropriate directional buttons for health issues and have a couple of decent weapons at hand, there’s not much that will stymie your progress toward the end-goal. It’s overkill to a degree, especially considering the game can be completed without much more than indifferent attention paid to your bustling character and inventory screens. There’s also armour, helmets, amulets, boots, charms and a whole host of ancillary bric-a-brac to assist DeathSpank on his ever-increasing roster of quests, sub-quests and other distractions.
An axe imbued with fire magic will obviously do little to deter a demonic imp, for instance, while its icy equivalent will obviously fare much better at dispensing the fiery critters. However, what elevates DeathSpank above other games that solely rely on such taxing repetitiveness is its resplendent presentation of both world and character design, the near-perfect delivery of its signature comedy aspects and the fact that, niggling gripes aside, it wholeheartedly delivers in the fun department.Ĭombat is handled by mapping numerous weapons DeathSpank can both purchase and acquire through defeating enemies to each of the controller’s face-buttons with ranged attacks covered through the use of our hero’s trusty crossbow, an infinitely replenishing tool for keeping the likes of inquisitive Greems at bay.
For make no mistake about it, DeathSpank is unashamedly a quest-grind, the incessant and often repetitive find-and-retrieve structure clearly the backbone of the game’s core mechanic. The nonsensical plot (DeathSpank wants to get his hands on an infamous trinket known as The Artifact for reasons probably best known to DeathSpank) suitably sets up its titular self-declared champion as he traverses a fantastical world inhabited by a typical cast of destitute folk requiring assistance and adversaries in dire need of vanquishing. Succinctly, DeathSpank is a comical and colourful Diablo clone, with liberal dashes of its own hack’n’slash button-bashing and role-playing lite flavours peppered throughout. Luckily, it also has one of gaming’s stalwart witty writers, Ron Gilbert, at its sturdy helm the humour and delivery from arguably Gilbert’s most beloved series, Monkey Island, evident throughout this quirky tale of demon poop, needy orphans and disproportionately wise-cracking heroes. Hothead’s DeathSpank – its very title instantly and proudly declaring a sincere case of irreverence and toilet humour – would therefore look to have its job cut out for it. In other words: you’re intentionally making things hard for yourself from the offset. In a medium where narrative is routinely a secondary (and sometimes tertiary) afterthought, choosing to willingly infuse your title with a healthy dose of the funnies is tantamount to turning up drunk for a blind date. There’s a reason why gaming’s comedy sub-genre is regarded as a dangerous and untapped vein, a test most developers would just rather not take.
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