The basic premise is fairly simple (at least, if you’re ignoring the game’s over-the-top dystopian spin on musical rebellion): Take the quick-moving combat of Rocksteady’s Arkham games—often noted for its rhythm-heavy, timing-dependent mixture of strikes, dodges, and counter-attacks—and make the subtext text by setting it all to music. That means your attacks (and those of your enemies) are timed snugly to the beat of whatever song is playing, with on-beat hits amplifying attack power and giving you more resources to spend on super moves. (In the plot’s one really clever touch, you’re playing as the drummer of a since-broken-up band, whose quest for vengeance means he’s essentially bringing a percussive beat to each of his former band members’ doors/faces.)
The thing about making a hybrid-design game like this, though, is that Brain Jar has essentially set itself two entirely separate boxes of problems to try to sift through at the same time. Of more pressing worry are those various issues attendant to rhythm games—most especially song selection, which is probably Dead As Disco’s biggest pitfall. Of your four main targets (and, thus, tracks) in the current version of the game, only half of them qualify as basically listenable, which is a huge problem for a game that’s all about paying close attention to songs to get both your audio and combat cues. (It’s not like you can mute a track you hate without crippling your ability to fight.) The other two—a K-pop riff with what feels like deliberately irritating vocals, and the aforementioned nu-metal “spectacle”—were two different levels of nails-on-a-chalkboard for me, especially in the early going, when I was spending a lot of time hearing the same songs over and over again as I got my ass kicked learning these fights.
Which can also feel, more often than not, like a slog: The game’s fairly simplistic fighting style—you really only have the one button for attacks, which can also be upgraded to do slower charged hits or supplemented with unlockable super moves—runs into the need for players to hear a decent chunk of each of its songs to sell the gimmick, giving each of its bosses massively padded health bars that have to be slowly worn down over the course of a tune. At the same time, attack timings from the baddies can be fairly punishing, and not always intuitive; there’s something especially galling about hitting a dodge directly on rhythm, only to realize you didn’t dodge the right way, and still took a pretty punishing hit. This blend of high attention being required for avoiding attacks, and almost no brain power being required to dish them out, means it’s shockingly easy for the mind to fatally wander in the middle of a supposedly climactic battle. You wouldn’t think you could yawn yourself to death while fending off attacks from a building-tall digital pop idol, but wonders, apparently, never cease.
After struggling with these issues throughout its first few levels, I was ready to write Dead As Disco off outright, but due diligence pushed me to explore the rest of the game’s offerings. A rap-themed sojourn was at least modestly fun—with its “villain,” Prophet, literally spitting potentially deadly bars straight at your hero’s head—but it wasn’t until I got to the last of the bunch, a battle against the defunct band’s former bassist, that the game suddenly seemed to wake up and make a real and robust pitch for itself. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the level is the only one with a well-known song backing it, as a high-speed cover of Michael Sembello’s Flashdance hit “Maniac” accompanies a blazingly tempoed battle through a subway station. After listlessly kicking my way through heavy metal dungeons and various WinAmp visualizers, I was suddenly grinning ear to ear as I dodged attacks to the propulsive beat, dancing between racing subway trains and feeling the moment when the audio, the enemies, and my own actions all melded together into something sublime. It’s one of the coolest moments I’ve had in a video game in months, and I almost missed it, because so little of the rest of the game lived up to its potential. And it’s not like the fights in that level are especially complex or robust—it’s probably the easiest in the game—but it demonstrates that Brain Jar grasps, on some level, that I’m not here to have my reflexes tested to the limits of my sanity: I just want to kick enormous amounts of ass while moving in time to great music. That’s the appeal here, and Dead As Disco‘s story mode—which is where it filters players first and foremost—feels sometimes seems borderline perverse in its efforts to get in the way of providing it.
There is, admittedly, clear evidence that the developer grasps at least some of this: Dead As Disco‘s marketing has been much more upfront about its appeal, not as a story-focused brawler, but a sort of DIY rhythm game; its launch trailer emphasized the robust tools included to add your own music into the game, allowing you to plow through various barebones arenas and grab bags of the game’s enemies with your own personal soundtrack. This is clearly where the game’s current core competency is at—and also where an already-robust fan community has been doing the most work, creating tracking maps for their own songs and then using the game’s earlier demo to post scores as they compete to clear them. All of which leaves Dead As Disco in a very weird place: As an incredibly cool tech demo that’s currently suffering from having a pretty mid brawler attached to it. If its story mode even had two levels as good as the “Maniac” one, it’d be a hard title not to immediately recommend. As-is, it’s stuck in that weird space that many Early Access games fall into: A series of good gaming ideas still in desperate need of a game.
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