Quick Look: Let It Die

YOU'RE dark like my soul.

Hilarious. I just listened to that segment in the Bombcast and was about to ask if we'd ever see a QL.

Thanks Senpai!

I feel that Grasshopper usually make games with more unique styles than this one, this look is just not doing it for me.

To be fair the E3 trailer was mostly video, but I was expecting a much darker sort of mood akin to that.

A dung beetle rolling a ball of dung/the world.

I'm really really having a lot of fun with Let It Die. There's kind of a lot going on that it doesn't really explain, but it makes more sense the longer you play. At some point you just deck yourself out in gear you built back in your waiting room and make a run of it while hopefully killing most enemies in 2 or 3 hits.

I will say the multiplayer stuff is kind of mandatory to a certain degree, but it's also pretty inoffensive in what you stand to lose. There's A LOT of currency to be gained by raiding, and enemy AI is pretty bad even when it's a player character.

NEVER sell those firework weapons! You can attack with those things to easily cook all the frogs and rats hanging around the tower.

Also if you walk up close to a fire while holding an item (like as in to throw) the icon will change and your character will just stick the rat or yogashroom or whatever into the fire to grill it without having to pick it back up again.

I really like this game, but man... I'm having a hard time motivating myself to keep playing it. Can't remember the last time I fell off a game so quickly.

Same here, for me it was the combination of not polished gameplay, poor conectivity in some cases (maybe it got better after launch) and technical jank (long load times and such), all of which lead to me deleting this cool game just today.

Pro Tip: There are 3 ways to bring back a dead fighter.

1. Death Metal lets you revive on the spot
2. Go to the freezer and pay Uncle Death some kill coins and he'll go out and bring your dead fighter back with all of their stuff intact, without the currency or xp they found
3. Go to where you died and kill your own hater. You don't get the items you had but you can get the fighter back so you don't have to level up a new one.

@shagge: Same here. This game gets shitty once you get to Grade 2. The Haters throughout the entire game level up to your highest grade. So you have a Grade 1 guy, you level up to Grade 2--now you need to start a new Grade 2 guy, while you're dealing with level 50 Haters armed with guns and fast melee weapons on every floor. It feels like they went "OK, you're probably hooked when you're at Grade 2, so we can start twisting the knife to get you to buy Death Metals."

I found it kind of abusive and I stopped playing.

Senpai! just play the game! no questions Just Climb !

I wish I could get into this game as much as you guys. I loved No More Heroes and Dark Souls, so this looks right up my alley. However, the poor animations, boring level design, and floaty combat just pushes me away.

Maybe I can try again down the road, so I'll keep installed for now.

@afashionablehat: Woof, that's exactly what I was afraid of. Between that and network hiccups/connectivity issues killing your character without warning, I think I'm done for now.

Ah well, still got way more out of it than I was expecting.

I'm pretty sure you at least get the coins back from a character you salvage, you may even get the xp but i'm bit more hazy on that.

I dont blame you, the whole tier system is shitty, if it doesnt even match you with people of a similar level then whats the point. It just feels like a way to make you grind whenever you make progress.

That being said i'm huge fan of these kind of games and i'm loving the style so i'm forcing myself to ignore /put up with some bs in the hopes that the other big bosses are as cool as the first.

@boozak: You do get the money and exp from freezer revived characters. The other big bosses are cool because they all have a unique thematic thing before the boss fight.

@afashionablehat:You can easily level new characters by just clearing bosses. Weapon mastery and blueprints both carry over between characters and once you figure out the mushrooms and sneak attack system you can easily kill a 50/75/100/125 level hater with a level 1 character.

I am on the 35th floor and haven't spent a cent.

Let it die, let it die, let it shrivel up and- come on, who's with me, huh!?

@afashionablehat: @quipido: @shagge: man talk about your quick honeymoons.

eh playing FFXV and pushing circle to win is probably more my speed anyway ; )

see this is the kind of dark souls game I could get into. This looks like great fun and is not at all ridiculously challenging like Dark Souls - good show.

This game has held my attention better than any other game released this year. Does it have its flaws? Sure. But man, does this game ooze style. The voice acting is great, the music is great, some of the weapons are really unique too. Hopefully it proves to be a hit for Grasshopper so they can update it a whole bunch.

@serujiow: When you're in the happy path, yes, you definitely can do it. But I strongly feel that, once one thing goes wrong, the game is incentivized to make things get worse and worse for you to get you to spend money.

I've put like 30 hours into this game and I'm still loving it. My surprise hit of the year.

I feel like I did the whole progression for this game in one Sunday.

It went from "man, this is a crazy thing with a hell of a lot of style, but what the fuck is going on?" to "now I understand this, and a lot of the systems are super cool - I can't wait to discover more" to "boy, this TDM stuff seems really poorly implemented, and the f2p stuff is coming up more and more; I hope this trend doesn't continue" to "this game is clearly designed to hook you with the good stuff up top and string you along until the difficulty forces you to drop cash or grind like crazy" in like 6-8 hours.

And now I'll probably never touch it again unless something changes drastically. This thing's cool, but it requires either dedication and time or cash, and I don't have any of those things in abundant supply.

Uncle Death for best character 2016 tho for sure

@homelessbird: I'm at floor 14 or so now and I'm not really seeing the part where I need to spend money. (Or more importantly, the part where it would improve my experience.) The only reason I can see to do that is if you want to brute force your way through by spending death metals every time you die, but that kinda defeats the purpose. It would be like if you just spent money to brute force your way through Dark Souls instead of having to make it back to your bloodstain.

If you could actually buy items/blueprints that would be game changing, but from what I've seen the only way to make real progress in this game is skill, and a certain degree of luck and grinding.

Granted, I'm not a fan of the way they handle Haters at this point in the game, but spending money wouldn't do anything to fix that.

@zeik: No, I think you're right - there's no real way to spend money to improve your experience, so to speak, if you have the time/energy to grind out a new character, or in-game currency. But you will absolutely hit a point where the game will force you to do THOSE things - the prices for everything just keep going up, the enemies will start to literally one-shot you in some cases, and it's possible to just get straight screwed by invasions. So it's really about how much you are bothered by that stuff, and like I said below, I don't really have the time for a game to hide the fun behind a pile of busy work. And it's pretty clear that it's busy work they're giving you so that you'll eventually say "fuck it, just let me at the fun" and give them five bucks or whatever.

.It's just... the way the game feels to play in the first couple hours is completely different from the couple after that, and I would argue the nosedive continues. I can't shake the feeling that I'm being strung along - that there's cool content just around the corner, but I never quite make it there. Also the repetitive parts of the gameplay (the limited attack animations, the repeated level sections, etc) start to grate more at that point.

It's a real cool game, and if you enjoy it more power to you, but I just couldn't deal with it any more after I got to the floor 20ish area.

This game came along and really ate into my Titanfall 2 nights, in a way I wasn't expecting; listening to Jeff and Jason talk about it just makes me wanna leave work early.

@buzz_clik: I would totally play a Blood Dragon style DLC called "Titanfall Nights"

@homelessbird: It definitely does not force you in any way to put in money to progress. If enemies are one shotting you then that means you are behind on R&D for armors and if you feel like you aren't doing enough damage that is because you are behind on R&D for weapons. The only reason to spend death metals other than expanding your storage is to brute force your way through the game instead of spending the time upgrading your items and characters.

@homelessbird: I just feel like a lot of these things are more inherent to its nature as a rogue-like(-like) than its nature as a F2P game. These types of games are never designed for rapid progress. I've played plenty of completely offline rogue-likes with very similar gameplay loops. You get as far as you can until you hit a wall, or die, then you grind for a while until you can pass that wall. Rinse and repeat. At least this game factors in a relatively large amount of skill into that equation, compared to other rogue-likes that end up being immensely stat dependant.

It's certainly not going to appeal to everyone, nor is this game the pinnacle of the genre, but it's a little unfair to write off everything as forced F2P hooks. They could strip out all the F2P currency and the benefits it provides and the game wouldn't really change. At least so far. Maybe those top floors are stupidly broken.

In case anyone was wondering the devs just announced their roadmap for future updates:

Faster Loading

More items and decals

More special enemies

Improvements on the base game including more fighting moves and adding floors to the tower.

@zeik: You are 100% correct about it being more similar to Rogue-like design philosophy than F2P philosophy. The only reason to spend money at the moment is to brute force your way through the game because you are impatient. You can either get better skillwise or get better equipment through R&D to progress and not have to spend a cent.

@serujiow:Again - I can't stress this enough - I get that you can grind a lot instead of spending money. I just don't want to do that. And I could always be wrong, but in my experience there's not much R&D is going to do for you against a high grade hater.

@zeik: I think you might be talking more about roguelike-likes in this case - games that are actually like Rogue (i.e. Nethack and its ilk) generally have hunger mechanics, or other similar systems that SPECIFICALLY discourage grinding levels in order to progress. It's actually what draws me to those games over experiences like this. You're encouraged to approach every situation like it's life and death, and find creative solutions, instead of just throwing cannon fodder at them until you eventually brute force your way through. I feel like Let It Die is hoping that you will do that. I didn't like Rogue Legacy as much as a lot of people did for similar reasons.

P.S. Isn't the term "roguelike" just awful for discussions like this? I hate it so much.

Also I disagree with your point about the F2P hooks - if you had paid $60 for this game, or even $20, you might be a lot less forgiving of it dropping high level haters on you in literally the first level just to fuck up your day, and a lot of the game's mechanics in general. And the fact that the game dangles the easy (paid) option over your head whenever you die, after specifically setting up unfair circumstances designed to kill you suddenly, leaves a bad taste in my mouth the more it happens. You can compare this to Dark Souls in a lot of ways, but that game straight-up doesn't offer you the option to pay money to break its gameplay loop, and given the way the rest of the game plays, I can't straight up ignore it, personally.

Also yeah, in my experience there was an increase in how fucked the whole thing felt the further I got into it.

I'm not going to hold my breath, but I hope this comes to PC at some point. This looks right up my alley. So much so that it's the first thing that's actually made me regret selling my PS4 last year.

@homelessbird: I recommend you you upgrade 1 tier weapon to 2 tier and use both... There is a significant difference. I agree that some stuff is unfair (like floor 23 Goto-9 initial fight or the game throwing high level haters depending of your max character level and tier)but is still fun to me.

I can confirm if you eat a boomshroom it will kill you.

I.....may have accidentally ate one with my very first fighter and killed him...

it sucked.

This game seems super cool. But I have too many games to play right now. I'll definitely dive into this after the new year when some stuff has been beaten. Hopefully we get some good updates by then.

DR SENPAI!!!!

@overbite: Someone probably already corrected it but buying back your fighter with kill coins DOES bring them back with all the kill coins and exp they collected. It jsut doesnt regester into your bank until you select them as a fighter. So if they die with 15k and you buy them back for 5k the 15k will be depositied when you select them.

This game is neat for what it is. UNCLE DEATH!

It's great to see this game after hearing it talked about so much on the podcast. I was wondering if I was missing out but now I don't think that I am.

THE SECRET TO MY SUCCESS!

It's a good year for Skater Deaths.

big games

I'm really glad that Giant Bomb finally got their music podcast off the ground. I know everyone learned about Feist from The Reminder, but Let it Die really is her best album.

@serujiow: all these improvements make it sound like this will be an interesting game to dive into 6 months from now when nothing is coming out and they've added a ton of stuff.

I know Warframe is basically unrecognizable to me now because of everything they added, which is cool that it keeps evolving.

i wish this was on the pc it seems like a really good game but I just can't be bothered to hook up my ps 4 these days (only one monitor)

I wonder if something is wrong with my PS4. Looking at the game here things are just loading up faster and there are no texture pop-ins and 3 second pauses every time you go to the shop or simply open up your rolodex . I think some of the other issues might be due to connectivity ( not in the US)

8:08
Throw your hands pun in the air like you just don't care.