Dead Static Drive is coming to Xbox and Game Pass on November 5th. The game’s tagline is “Grand Theft Cthulhu,” and the inspirations are clear. You will venture through a dying world, overrun by Lovecraftian monsters. For every good idea, there are numerous issues with controls, broken quests, and a general lack of cohesion between systems. It’s a game that had moments I loved, and plenty more that I hated.
A Nightmare 80s America
The premise and look of Dead Static Drive are fantastic. I love the game’s setting of a mid-80s American southwest that is slowly overtaken by nightmarish monsters. You play as Hearst, a teen whose appearance, first name, and gender are up to you to decide. Hearst is looking for their parents, whom they have not seen for years.
The map is broken up into various cities in the region, and you’ll visit and revisit all of them as you search for your folks, stop madmen, chase down dozens of monstrous hunters, and more. At least when it works. Dead Static Drive had more quests break on me than any game I can remember. Going from city to city requires fuel in one of the various cars you can find littered around.
Often, I would get a new quest, conveniently handed to me by the in-game radio, and head off. By the time I got to that city, the quest was gone, and when it worked more often than not, I couldn’t get it to properly complete. I must have healed the construction worker who hurt his arm about 50 times, scavenging everything I could, before the game finally registered the action.
DSD is a driving and scavenging game. There is shooting and melee, though Hearst tends to die after a few hits from any of the game’s enemies. Inexplicably, monsters come out at night, huge eyeball-tentacle head humans, or strange ghostly-bodied creeps with animal skull heads. Sometimes you fight regular people, too, and it never feels good; none of the game ever does.
Imprecise, floaty everything
Dead Static Drive has two camera angles: Isometric and Chase. The chase camera angle lazily floats behind you as you’re driving or on foot, never properly letting you see where you’re going. I stuck with isometric, which isn’t quite the old-style GTA that the game’s subtitle invokes. There is no direct overhead camera, and it is pretty low, in more of a Diablo-style angle.
The gameplay primarily consists of driving various, insanely fast cars or buses. No matter what vehicle you have, they can go from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds and love flipping over. I barely held down the right trigger and had a bus zip off like the latest model Tesla. Every vehicle has a health stat alongside a fuel system. To refill, you drive up to one of the fourteen thousand gas stations in this county, pick up the pump, and move over to the back-right of the vehicle. From here you ‘use’ the gas pump in your right hand.
A lot of the game’s inventory interactions work this way. You will have to repeatedly move and use and reload, heal, and everything using this grid-based system that is far more at home on a mouse and keyboard. It gets the job done, but it is a clunky UI that gets in the way of the far too often action. DSD wants you to figure everything out on your own, as you are dumped into the game with zero tutorial on how most things work.
It’s a break thing to get wood and metal scraps to fix things or board up windows, a type of game, yet there is no real incentive to ever do it. So many disparate gameplay systems are thrown in with no guidance on how or why you’d need to use them. What is the point of food, alcohol, or even healing items if you can simply run away from any non-boss fight and take a quick nap in your car? The biggest issue, though, is that none of it ever feels good.
Movement and combat feel off. Aiming ranged weapons with the analog sticks feels more luck-based than skill. Instead of being a lightly magnetized twin-stick shooter, you get an actual small reticle that you have to massage onto enemies. Some creatures crawl on the ground, and hitting them with shots from my pistol was nearly impossible in the heat of a fight.
I played the game primarily on Xbox Series X, though it is Play Anywhere. Trying it out on PC gave me terrible performance issues whenever a menu screen was active. It ran great in-game, though figuring out what each button did was a nightmare. It was far easier to aim, though Hearst’s inability to take a punch meant that I still died repeatedly in any encounter with enemies who had ranged attacks.
There is a shadow demon monster with an animal skull head that does a puke attack, which, if it hits you, is almost always an instant kill as it ticks away a heart of health every .1 seconds. The gameplay is so poor and broken that it breaks my heart, because the look, feel, and music of the game are damned cool, and also broken.
More Issues
The game audio is a mixture of peppy 80s-style music when travelling between cities and spooky ambience when things get dangerous. Sound effects are few and far between, with them repeatedly disappearing entirely for sections of my playthrough on both console and PC. The number of times I’d be on foot and hear nothing except for the tire squeals that should have played minutes ago was more than I could count on all my fingers and toes.
The graphics have a great, stylized look to them, and everything ran fairly well on my Xbox. There were a few times when the textures started to pop and shimmer when I attempted certain interactions. The worst, though, were the numerous times that fire didn’t render, and so my main character and the party members I had picked up along the way would be set ablaze and die instantly.
Death isn’t the end for your party members; various people around town will help you fight and give you quests. There are a few main ones that can join your group, and I recommend finding the bus as quickly as you can; otherwise, you’ll be unable to recruit them all. Every time you go between cities, you can talk with a party member and build up their friendship level.
With party quests, I had a few completely break to the point that I ended up restarting my playthrough. They worked the second time, and I hope there is a day-one patch coming, because as is, the game isn’t enjoyable enough to be worth playing once, let alone multiple times, due to all the bugs I have encountered.
Wrapping Things Up
Dead Static Drive is a pretty, broken game. The poor gameplay mechanics and constant issues with quest progression further drag down what is otherwise a disappointing title.
Dead Static Drive
Played on
Xbox Series X (Main) & PC
PROS
- Great Art Style
- Occasional Cool Vibes
CONS
- Poor Driving
- Poor Combat
- Broken Quests
- Broken Audio
- Lack of Tutorials
