Quickly Dead Cells pulls you in, and you realise that rather than being the end, dying is part of the game and something that must be used in order to progress further. It is here the roguelike elements kick in – the randomly generating levels, the permadeath, the skills to be updated to help you on your quest. Dead Cells wastes no time in shifting this up a gear, and it isn’t long before you find yourself on the wrong side of an enemies attack, at which point you find your mass of cells back at the beginning, dropping from the tube in the ceiling and reanimating another corpse to do it all over again. Running and jumping through the world is fun, and early on combat finds you ploughing through enemies with ease. Obvious comparisons such as Dead Cells’ 2D pixel art graphics and side-scrolling aside, Dead Cells is tough – and it knows it.įighting your way through the first level is easy, and serves to introduce you to the basic gameplay. Developers Motion Twin have done an excellent job, and Dead Cells does hark back to those 8-bit games of yesteryear, pulling all the right nostalgic strings. The controls are tight, and platforming in Dead Cells is enjoyable and quick to pick up. It is this corpse that you take control of, running, jumping, slicing and rolling through each randomly generated level. The premise to Dead Cells is simple – you start off as a mass of cells that quickly falls from a tube in the ceiling like a blob of toothpaste, before slithering and reanimating a nearby dead corpse.

Dead cells ps4