Deadlink

There’s a specific subgenre that has quietly become one of the most competitive spaces in independent development: the first-person roguelite shooter. Gungeon-style run structure, Doom-style movement, Hades-style meta-progression. Everyone is chasing the same high — the moment where mechanical skill and randomized build-craft collide and produce something that feels authored just for you. Roboquest is in this space. Gunfire Reborn is in this space. So is Deadlink, from Poland’s Gruby Entertainment, published by SuperGG.com, released July 27, 2023 at $24.99, and shipped exclusively on Steam.

Gruby’s pitch is elegantly cynical, and it solves the genre’s oldest narrative problem in one stroke. You are not a chosen one. You are a mid-level operative at the Corporate Security Agency, sitting safely behind a console, remotely piloting disposable autonomous combat shells into hostile megacorporate territory. Death isn’t a narrative contrivance to be hand-waved by time loops or underworld bureaucracy. Death is Tuesday. You lose a shell, you requisition another, you go back in. The roguelite death loop is not grafted onto the fiction; it is the fiction. That’s a smart piece of design thinking, and it costs the game nothing.

What you get across four districts — slums, labs, warehouses, and the inevitable glass-and-chrome office tower — is arena combat at close to maximum aggression. Rooms seal. Enemies pour in. You dash, jump, slam, shove, and shoot your way to an unlock, then pick your next branch on the run map.

The reception has been warm — Deadlink sits at a Metacritic of 80 — but the enthusiasm comes with a consistent caveat: the combat earns the praise, and the structure earns the criticism. This is not a divisive game so much as a game with a very clearly defined ceiling, and that ceiling arrives early.

• Four Combat Shells: Distinct classes with their own weapon loadouts, passives, and abilities — long-range precision, status-effect debuffing, shotgun brawling, and crowd control. These are real playstyle divergences, not palette swaps, and each is unlocked through meta-progression.
• Aggression-Forward Arena Combat: Rooms lock down and force engagement. Movement is dash/jump/slam, and a melee shove exists specifically to buy space or reposition enemies — chaining it into gunfire is the core skill expression.
• Heavily Destructible Environments: Cover shatters, props explode, and breakables drop resources. The physicality of the spaces sells the violence.
• Layered Run Randomization: Branching room choices, currency drops, and stacking augment and implant upgrades shape each run, on top of persistent between-run unlocks.
• Four District Bosses + Time Trial Mode: Each district caps with a set-piece fight; a post-launch score-chasing mode adds a competitive lane for players who’ve seen everything else.
• Presentation Package: Comic-panel cutscenes, a synth-heavy soundtrack, full controller support, Steam achievements, trading cards, and cloud saves.

The Gameplay Loop

Let’s be precise about what Deadlink does well, because it deserves the credit.

The moment-to-moment shooting is superb. The shorthand comparison — “Doom Eternal combat with Hades progression” — is lazy, but it’s directionally right. Weapons are designed with weight and audible authority. Enemies telegraph clearly, rooms are legible, and the dash has enough i-frames to function as a tool rather than a prayer, while the slam gives verticality an actual purpose beyond dodging. Most importantly, the melee shove reframes crowd management: instead of backpedaling from a swarm, you’re pushing through it, creating a firing lane, and punishing whatever stumbled backward. That’s the difference between a shooter about survival and a shooter about dominance. Deadlink is firmly the latter.

The frame-to-frame readability under chaos is the design’s quiet strength, and that legibility is what makes high-speed play possible rather than lucky. The ULTRAKILL comparisons aren’t about style — they’re about a game built to trust the player with speed.

Where the Structure Buckles

Now the problem, and it’s structural rather than mechanical.

Deadlink’s build economy is too timid for its own combat. Augments and implants are, overwhelmingly, incremental. More damage. More crit. A slightly larger magazine. A modest status uptick. Compare this to the genre’s high-water marks, where a single boon can rewrite what your weapon is — turning a pistol into a chain-lightning conduit, or making a dash the primary damage source. Deadlink almost never does that. You leave most runs having gotten stronger without having become different. When the combat is this expressive, the build system’s failure to escalate that expression is the single most conspicuous missed opportunity in the design.

This compounds with a content ceiling that arrives early. Four districts and four bosses is a thin deck to shuffle. Once the arena layouts and boss tells are internalized — which the pacing encourages doing quickly — the randomization has nothing left to randomize except which order familiar things appear in. Limited enemy variety accelerates the same problem: you stop learning encounters and start executing them.

Then there’s the pacing. Runs are feast-or-famine: a good early upgrade branch snowballs into a comfortable clear, while a poor one leaves you underpowered against a boss that hasn’t scaled down to meet you. Roguelites live and die on the quality of their losses. A run lost to greed is instructive. A run lost to stingy branch options is just an expense.

The Friction Nobody Asked For

One design decision deserves specific criticism: resource-bearing breakables. Destructible environments are a legitimate strength here — they make firefights feel kinetic. But attaching currency drops to them converts a spectacle system into a chore system. After every arena clears, the optimal play is to walk the room and smash every crate, monitor, and vending machine before proceeding. This is a game built entirely around forward momentum, and it has installed a mandatory pause at the end of each engagement in which you methodically vandalize furniture. It’s the clearest example of an incentive fighting the game’s own thesis.

The meta-progression amplifies it. Reaching the later districts with a realistic chance of clearing them requires grinding unlocks, which means running early districts repeatedly, which means more furniture. For players who came for the combat, the tax is real.

The art direction is a genuine asset. Gruby has resisted the neon-vomit default that most cyberpunk indies settle for, and instead builds real environmental contrast: grimy, cramped slum interiors giving way to sterile lab whites and finally to the cold reflective surfaces of corporate towers. The districts read differently, which matters enormously when you’re seeing them repeatedly. Comic-panel cutscenes between districts are a smart economy — they deliver tone and narrative for a fraction of what cinematics would cost, and they suit the pulpy corporate-noir register perfectly.

The soundtrack is synthwave, which is the least surprising sentence in this review, but it’s well-produced and mixed to sit under the gunfire rather than compete with it.

Technically, the design is built sensibly for its ambitions: a 2D-styled game of this scope is light on hardware, and the HUD is dense with build information but stays out of the center screen where it matters. That said, the game’s polish is only as good as its weakest patch, and a movement shooter lives or dies on sustained performance — anyone buying should be prepared to check how it runs on their own setup.

Steam-only, single-player only, and the platform fit is close to ideal.

Mouse and keyboard is the correct way to play this. The game asks for rapid target switching between fast-moving enemies at varying ranges, and one of the four shells is built around long-range precision. A mouse serves that; a stick doesn’t, quite. That said, full controller support is properly implemented rather than checkbox-ticked, and the shotgun brawler and crowd-control shells are designed to play comfortably on a pad. Steam Deck owners get the benefit of the game’s modest hardware demands, though the aim ceiling on trackpads or sticks will cap how deep anyone gets into the harder districts.

Cloud saves matter more than usual in a meta-progression game — your unlock ledger is the actual investment, and it follows you between machines. Achievements and trading cards are standard-issue. The absence of any multiplayer or co-op is worth flagging plainly: Roboquest offers co-op, and for players who treat this subgenre as a couch or Discord activity, that alone may decide the purchase.

Deadlink is a superb shooter housed inside an inadequate roguelite, and enjoyment depends almost entirely on which of those two nouns gets weighted more heavily — and for most people, the structure will win that argument.

Gruby Entertainment has built something a lot of larger studios can’t: combat with real texture, where the difference between a good player and a great one is visible in every room. The shells are distinct enough to justify replaying the same districts. The fiction earns its structure.

But the game asks players to replay content it hasn’t built enough of, using upgrades that don’t change enough to make the replay feel new. Before long, the whole design has been seen. Everything after that is execution against known variables — which is fine, and for the Time Trial crowd it’s the point, but it’s not what the roguelite framing promises. The praise and the dominant complaint attached to it are both accurate. Both things are true simultaneously.

If Roboquest’s co-op and deeper build variety matter, buy that first. If what’s wanted is the cleanest, meanest single-player gunfeel in the subgenre, Deadlink delivers it. Just go in knowing it’s a very good weekend, not a very good year.