Dead Weight Review — Sky Captain

Dead Weight is a tactical turn-based roguelike that sets you upon the sea of clouds, navigating an airship from island to island in an epic adventure to rescue your friends, beat back pirates, and prevent the rise of dark gods, where one wrong move can be the difference between death, encroaching madness, or a long and rather uncomfortable fall into the gaping maw of the abyss.

That’s no exaggeration either, as the fantastical and interesting world that Dead Weight presents is one in which the abyss, domain of all-powerful gods, rests below the floating islands and airships, awaiting anything that falls into its grasp. Thankfully, you find yourself favored by the gods below, who grant you a second chance each time you find yourself lost in their domain, so that you might defeat an awakening evil before it is too late.

Mechanically speaking, Dead Weight splits itself between two areas: the island-hopping overworld and its turn-based battles.

The overworld serves as your roguelike campaign, procedurally generating which islands you find each time you start a new run and where you’ll find them. Interestingly, you don’t have to go from level to level to get to the boss fights and important campaign bits; you can just fly straight towards them. However, doing so without stopping to find equipment or allies is simply giving yourself an unnecessary challenge.

The overworld is an open world that you can fly around freely, with your only limiter being the fuel you have in your ship’s tank. If you run out of fuel, you must either sacrifice your ship’s health to continue flying or drift aimlessly at the cost of madness (a mechanic that summons more, increasingly difficult enemies to your encounters) and hope you end up somewhere useful. Fuel is loot you receive from battles or, once you unlock the option, is purchased at cities from the dockyard.

This is one way in which a very persistent problem in Dead Weight can manifest itself: the RNG can, at times, utterly ruin a run before it starts. I have had more than a few campaigns where I chose to fly off in a direction, only to run out of fuel quickly and find my only options were to encounter islands that did not provide the resource I needed. This killed my run before it even began, as choosing to drift isn’t always a solution. You can find yourself at a town, now with half of your madness bar filled, and not have the refueling station unlocked, sort of just leaving you dead in the water and forced to restart your run.

Combat encounters play out as turn-based skirmishes with a heavy emphasis on positioning. Using your two action points, you must choose to move, attack, shove enemies, or use special gear while avoiding tiles that enemies are going to attack. The inability to use the same action twice in a turn, in my opinion, sort of limits the strategic depth of the game. You will almost always find yourself either using both of your movement actions in a turn, or moving and attacking or pushing an enemy.

The game can also end before it begins in combat encounters, as you can and will find yourself in positions where you’ve lost the battle simply by how the enemies spawn. There are, more often than not, situations where you simply cannot move out of the range of attacks, and with only three health, that usually leads to you being dead or close to death by the end of a turn. You are allowed to restart battles, but it’s a limited-use currency that you carry for your entire run.

Something I also found strange was how the game punishes you for using the small level design to push enemies off the edge, an action that fills your madness bar, which, again, proceeds to make the entire run harder if you let it get too full. Getting enemies into a position where you can shove them into the abyss feels less like a reward for clever positioning and more like a tradeoff: kill this enemy relatively quicker and make your run harder in the future.

Dead Weight has its joys. I loved the art, the world, and the characters, even if their exchanges were brief and not the most colorful. The vivid pixel art shows more than the game tells, and for a roguelike, I think that works especially well. The gameplay, though it can sometimes be unnecessarily punishing in ways that you simply cannot counterplay (as seen in the rest of this review), is still fun, and I enjoyed unlocking new characters, gathering gear, and upgrading my loot, even if not all of the upgrades felt as meaningful as others.

Progression in the game could overall use a lot of improvement, but rather than listing each individual way I felt like I wasn’t making progress, I will simply say that the game could do a lot more to make you feel more powerful after battles rather than simply rewarding you with gear that often serves a gimmicky purpose out of the box, if any purpose at all, and must be upgraded to be really useful.

Dead Weight is fun, but it is the most I’ve ever had to restart a run in a roguelike. Progression both during and outside of your runs feels a little weak, and some design choices can leave your run doomed before it even begins. That being said, the gameplay is still engaging enough that, when paired with the great setting, impressive art, and characters, it is enough to keep you going, even if you’re hitting that restart button more often than you should.

All that being said, the game is priced at an incredibly fair $12.99, or less with the current sale (at the time of writing), a price that I think is actually underselling itself. For a price like that, I recommend you give the game a try, even if you’re still not sure about it.

Dead Weight was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Dead Weight is available on Steam.