GoKawiilIf you've ever reached a flow state in a beat 'em up game, you know that their large-scale brawls quickly become something akin to a combo-driven dance. If you adapt to the choreography, you're rewarded with a symphony of violence and a high score. Developer Brain Jar Games' Dead as Disco feels like a natural next step for the genre -- a literal "beat 'em up to the beat."
And make no mistake, you'll definitely be putting the beatdown on some eclectic characters as Charlie Disco, a former chart-topping rockstar who's recently returned from the dead and is looking to resurrect his career by getting the band back together. There's only one problem: His bandmates are the very people who betrayed him, left him for dead 10 years earlier and went on to sell out and sign a major record deal. Awkward.
What follows is a boss rush in which Disco literally knocks some sense into his old friends one by one, dragging them back to the club they used to play at before they made it big. It comes across as an earnest, lighthearted pastiche of much darker revenge stories like The Crow and Drive -- I mean, just look at the back of the main character's jacket. It might as well have a scorpion motif slapped on it.
While parts of Dead as Disco's Steam Early Access release feel a little undercooked -- the purchasable club decorations and bandmate side quests come across as afterthoughts, at least for now -- the fundamentals are strong. Combat is snappy and responsive, and the four story levels in the current build play out like impressive, interactive concerts, where the visual spectacle alone can feel worth the price of admission.
Boss fights are special, multiphase endurance tests packed with bright lights and unique mechanics, and they're an absolute tour de force, which they should be, given that they're the biggest addition Dead as Disco's Early Access build has over the demo.
Charlie Disco will have to take on some of the best -- and most dangerous -- musicians in the world to get his band back together and take the fight to the record company. Brain Jar Games
Trope-y, flashy and unabashedly in love with the art of music
It's hard not to wonder what kind of music Charlie Disco was making in his heyday, especially since his band is such a disparate mix of musicians with standout character designs. While several bosses haven't made it into the game just yet, there are currently four high-priority targets Disco can take on in any order he chooses, like if Mega Man fought with a whole lot more groove.
Charlie tracks down each of his former bandmates across their own distinct urban zones. The acidic, green-tinged punk rocker Hemlock throws down in the city's subways. The refined rapper Prophet takes the fight from the streets up to the highest penthouses. The heavy-metal cyborg Dex shreds on an electric guitar while Tesla coils in the power plant's core. And the AI-generated K-pop star Arora quite literally launches your showdown into outer space.
The boss fights are extremely creative and borrow artistically from real-life genre fare. Prophet, for instance, attacks you with physical manifestations of his words, while Dex uses a biomechanical chair that would look right at home in a Nine Inch Nails music video. The AI Arora even summons a massive light construct of herself to battle against you (it's not-so-subtly inspired by Blade Runner 2049 -- there's that Ryan Gosling inspiration again).
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