Dead Alliance is one of those games where I was really excited about playing it, as we all know I’m a bit of a sucker for some hype. I watched a few videos but stayed away from reviews just in case it swayed my opinion somewhat. So did Dead Alliance live up to my expectations? Read on and see.

The short answer is no, it didn’t, not by any stretch of the imagination, but in the interest of fairness, I will tell you why. Dead Alliance is brought to us by Illfonic and Published by Maximum Games. To give you some idea of what they’re all about Illfonic bought us Friday the 13th, which incidentally is a bit of a smash on PC. Maximum Games gave us The Surge also a smash, I think you’ll agree two spot on games. Just check out my The Surge review, I loved that game. Dead Alliance sits somewhere way way lower than those two classics, when I mean low I mean like, sewer low.

The story is quite straightforward, a post-apocalyptic world filled with zombies and the only remaining safe zones are military bases and you have to kill the zombies as well as the opposing team. The game brings elements of a MOBA into an FPS action shooter, which sounds amazing right? I think so, hence the reason I was so excited to play it.

A twist of irony was in one the trailers I watched and a warning appeared at the start stating that the video did not represent the final quality of the game. Well, it certainly doesn’t, in fact, the game is worse, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen before. Dead Alliance is basically broken mess. One thing I really didn’t like was the control scheme, it uses the basic FPS layout but the movement is inaccurate and often causes you to completely miss your target, you make a slight adjustment to your aim and completely miss again. I would normally put that down to my skill, however, I played with the settings and it made little to no difference at all. The constant missing and hits not registering on targets made for quite a frustrating first few minutes.

Graphically the game is poor too, the appalling framerate issues did not help towards the inaccurate firing at the enemy. The best way I can describe it trying to play a triple-A title on a machine that isn’t designed to run it, you get the same glitchy gameplay and none of the visuals that you should have or are used to from modern games.  Along with the graphical atrocity comes the connection issues too, connecting to a multiplayer game take a few attempts and quickly became boring.

There are basically a few game modes you can play, these aren’t anything different from most online games though and to be honest aren’t implemented very well in this at all. The twist in the multiplayer tale is that there are zombies strolling around the map, I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with this idea in one hand I quite like it but on the other, it got quite annoying especially when the opposing team were winning and you had to knuckle down. You can, however, use the zombies to your advantage by using tactical weaponry to lure them into tight spots etc. There are lots of weapons and load outs to choose from which is nice, you earn money to buy new ones etc etc.

An interesting selling point though is if multiplayer is your thing. You can buy the game as a standalone multiplayer experience. If you like just the single player aspect then you can buy that on its own too, you then have the freedom to upgrade to the full package from either version. Be warned though, there is no campaign and the single player is basically multiplayer but with bots… pointless really.

This has basically been a slating hasn’t it? To be honest with good reason. I was fortunate enough to have a review code for the game but this game is full priced and I would be pretty angry if I’d have been greeted with these issues after spending 30 notes on an unfinished game. Let’s face it though it’s not the first time this has happened is it? I’m looking at you Destiny. I have no doubt in my mind that with a hefty update the main issues could be fixed and maybe that’s in the pipeline but for now as it is I would say Dead Alliance is pretty unplayable. Time to go back to Destiny 2 for a while.

Thanks to Maximun Games and Xbox for supporting TiX