Passable action fails to buoy weak design
Do you burst into uncontrollable laughter at fart jokes? Does the sight of underpants induce paroxysms of hearty gut chuckles in you? Then tighten your safety helmet, wipe yourself off with your drool bib, and find an adult to buy this game for you immediately, because you're in for a nonstop laugh riot!
If, however, scatological humor isn't satisfying to you, then DeathSpank probably won't win you over with its hilarious writing. Instead, it falls to the gameplay to entertain, and here there are some big issues.
DeathSpank has a lot of game design defects. It's a loot-em-up game, but the loot you find is usually nearly worthless. Armor doesn't reduce the damage you take - instead, it just raises your max health. Thus, your reward for finding a great new suit of armor is just that you'll have to wait around even longer eating between fights to recover health. What's more, you won't usually be eagerly hoping to find the next piece of gear, since you can just buy a full suit of top-quality equipment whenever you feel like it. Some pieces offer elemental resistance, but since there's limited inventory space and no stash for storage, it's usually impractical to hang on to a specific-purpose set for special occasions. It's also pointless, since 100% resistance potions are readily available, and you never really need them anyway.
Games of this type are usually driven by character progression, but your options for that are extremely limited. When you level up, you can choose between bonuses like "5% more melee damage" or "monsters drop 5% more gold." These are boring options, which make almost no noticeable impact on gameplay, and you can only select each one a couple times anyway, so you won't be able to customize your character, since you'll be forced to take them all at some point.
Leveling caps at a mere 20, and the curve is such that you'll blaze through the first dozen levels quickly, then slowly drag your heels through the last few, so as to stretch them over the latter half of the game. Your rewards for progression are minuscule and infrequent.
Visually, DeathSpank has a unique style that was clearly chosen to save time on art assets. Almost everything in the game, aside from the monsters and characters, is just a flat 2D billboard. There are almost no indoor sections in the game. Basically, you'll be running around in nearly-identical bumpy hillscapes through the entire game, differentiated only by the color of the local grass and sky.
It's frequently hard to distinguish enemies from the backgrounds. The framerate dips noticeably if you zoom the camera out, even though there's very little eye candy to look at. At least on the PS3 version, there is also very unpleasant screen tearing. It can be straining to look at the game for extended periods of time.
Combat is the most fun part of the game, although your options are mainly just "swing sword" or "block." You occasionally get one-time-use items that have special effects like raining meteors on an opponent, and you can fire a ranged crossbow. There are buffing potions you can use, but their effects are so minor as to be meaningless. Most enemies will either rush up to you and swing steadily, or sit back and plink at you from range. However, the AI inexplicably follows a WoW-like model where, if an enemy thinks he can't reach you, he'll turn invincible and run back to his spawn point. This means you are penalized for not playing stupidly - if you do not allow enemies to get some hits off, they'll decide to just cheat and go home. I had a boss encounter reset midway because the boss AI freaked out, even though I hadn't moved more than 15 feet beyond the boss' starting location.
Questing usually follows an MMORPG model, where you are tasked to run from point A to point B, or go collect 50 monster guts, and the like. There are a couple minor puzzles, where you combine two items together or drop an item somewhere.
DeathSpank could have been a really fun game, if it had interesting loot, compelling character progression options, diverse environments, exciting combat, brain-tickling puzzles, or funny writing that wasn't at a low-brow fart joke level. It has none of those things.
