Dead End Job Review
Lives up to its name.
Dead End Job is a game about a low-wage grunt tasked with busting ghosts all over town, armed only with a ghost blaster and ghost vacuum. And no, his name isn’t Luigi. There are a lot of similarities between this indie and Luigi’s Mansion on the surface, but Dead End Job isn’t nearly as adept at ghost hunting as Mario’s brother.
Essentially a smaller-scale twin-stick shooter, the game tasks players and their grungy alter-ego with clearing ghosts out of randomly generated, multi-room locations while rescuing trapped civilians. Played from a somewhat isometric viewpoint, the cartoonish graphics are amusing but limited by sometimes choppy animation.
Starting off in an office building, you’ll go from room to room, first wearing down ghosts’ health with your blaster. When they’re stunned, just run up to them and suck them up with your vacuum. The more ghosts you capture, the more experience you earn, which enables your character to be promoted. Each new promotion level earns you a new boost—sometimes faster or more powerful shots or greater chances of finding loot. Destroying objects and catching ghosts can also reveal over 100 different items.
Food, one-off weapons (like explosives), baked beans (ghosts hate farts), and money are all worth searching out. Fail, however, and you’re back at square one, losing any items and level perks you gained. Dead End Job seems simple enough, but has a few nagging issues that make it more frustrating.
The main problem is the use of obstacles. Even when you can destroy something (like a bookcase, copier, tree, what have you), it doesn’t actually get the object out of your way. It just looks crushed, while still standing stoically in place. Smaller non-destructible objects, like wastebaskets, are immovable roadblocks and all these things can easily hamper your movement.
This is especially annoying during fights with four or five ghosts at once, where they can move around freely and even shoot through objects. After several rounds of abject frustrating failure trying to clear an entire level out, it became apparent that the best tactic was mostly running through the rooms, ignoring the ghosts to find the goal rooms containing the captured civilians.
Once the level goal is complete, you’ll have to rush back through the maze to find the level exit. There’s a constant economy of risk vs reward at play here, which adds some tension and strategy. On the other hand, dying while rushing to the exit because a trash can is in the way is absurdly annoying.
Once you get into the game’s rhythm and understand its limitations, Dead End Job does get more fun. A big part of the appeal is the presentation. The characters are a bizarre, Ren and Stimpy-like collection of outcasts and the humor is decidedly low-brow. There’s an impressive range of different ghosts and some of them are quite clever, like the fluorescent light ghost that literally conjures those horrible exploding tubes around you. The game opens with a surprisingly amusing animated theme song and the actual score is also pretty good.
Individual ghost types vary a lot in attack style—some long-range, others brawlers, and a few that lay traps, forcing the player to constantly adjust their tactics. Since you’re inevitably thrown into rooms with multiple types of ghosts, the action can get frantic. Possibly too much so, given the noticeable lack of finesse in the twin-stick aiming. Much like classic games of this type, Dead End Job seems to run with the very retro style of eight-directions of aiming. This makes fine-tuning your shots difficult. There is the adaptive aim assist option, which does help for those of us with bad aim.
Finally, there’s a weird two-player drop-in/out cooperative mode that feels as if it were just thrown in. The second player can come in at any time as player one’s ghostly friend, but its usage is incredibly limited. While the ghost can pass through obstacles, its only weapon is a goo gun that can either slow down ghosts directly or splat the ground with goo that slows the other player down. It’s not a terribly fun or meaningful feature, unfortunately.
Dead End Job does manage to simulate that feeling of a ponderous, repetitive crappy job thanks to its grindy nature, questionable furniture placement, and not-quite-permadeath respawn system. The variety of goofy ghosts to bust and beefy amount of levels are the high points and for a cheap thrill, you could do worse—or a lot better.
[Reviewed on Xbox One]