Death Trash
Crafting Legends
Death Trash is a new action role-playing game (ARPG) that has recently been released into Steam’s Early Access program. It’s set in a variation of the post-apocalyptic settings you’ve probably seen in other genre franchises such as Fallout and Wasteland. But instead of having to contend with mutated creatures (and humans), you’ll be warding off all sorts of mutilated meat creatures.
As its Steam page describes it:
“Death Trash features a post-apocalyptic world where cosmic horrors long for humanity but meet punks with shotguns. It combines old-school role-playing, modern action gameplay, and player freedom. Create your own character and explore a handcrafted world.”
Similar to a traditional tabletop role-playing game you’ll go through a character creation process. Being a fan of PC games that sport character creation systems, I really enjoy this aspect of Death Trash. However, it appears that most of your skills are only of use for when you engage in combat.
There’s also a handy tutorial that you can opt into that will help you learn Death Trash’s basic game systems. Once you complete that (very recommended) you’ll be unleashed into the game’s environs. Talking to various NPCs feels pretty organic. You can accept different kinds of quests from them as well as visiting a wide array of locales.
These locations can be found by consulting the world map. At least the ones that have already been revealed by the quests you’ve taken on but many of them also have to be discovered. Some random encounters usually contain either useful merchants or enemies.
Death Trash’s combat system is pretty straightforward and accessible, with a gradually increasing learning curve. Melee combat is just as important as ranged combat. Perhaps even more so since you can easily run out of ammunition if you rely too much on ranged. You can also summon allies to fight your enemies if you get into too much deep water.
What surprised me the most is that despite being in Early Access, Death Trash already has a wide variety of weapon and armor types available. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always clear what each weapon did or how it affected enemies. Much of learning what weapon is most useful against the different types of enemies can be learned through trial and error.
Death Trash has a stealth system at play that can allow you to silently sneak up on foes. In this way, you can dispatch them without having to engage them in drawn-out battles. While this game design choice can allow you to completely avoid fights altogether, it also won’t earn you any experience points or loot. Therefore, I usually opt for engaging any enemies I come across (unless they look too powerful).
When you encounter NPCs, their dialogue is pretty much limited to offering or concluding quests. So, there’s a lot of room to flesh that aspect of the game. That will probably happen as it moves through its Early Access period. Hopefully, NPCs will be able to drop more of the game’s lore on players and allow for more world-building.
The game’s main campaign took around six hours to complete and that’s after visiting all of the available points of interest on the world map (although I might have missed a couple). Some of the game’s locales are still blocked off so I’m sure that these will open up as further development happens.
So far, Death Trash is loads of fun and very different from many of the other post-apocalyptic games that I’ve tried in the past. It has a unique vibe to it (if a little too grotesque sometimes) and seems to have a bright future ahead of it. I’ll be back to review it again once it leaves Early Access.
SCORE: 8.2/10
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