Death Penalty: Beginning

The game is itself a death penalty for players. Shitty developer with their shitty game...

My full thoughts on the game can be summarized here, if you feel your eyes aren't down for reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTnWP0n5MEk

Death Penalty: Beginning is a, "one man operation," released in January of 2017. As with most games seemingly grandfathered in from the now defunct Steam Greenlight, Death Penalty is an asset flip, using mostly pre-bought models, environments and animations to form it's game.

The gameplay is far less than titilating; essentially a, "run from point A to point b," event with some minor vehicle driving and minimal combat. However, the game is riddled with a multitude of bugs, such as missing executables and REFUSING TO BE INSTALLED TO MY PERSONAL COMPUTER. After finally managing to bring it to a working state, this game is not optimized for run on any level of PC, and has massive graphical and technical issues.

As with similar games, this would be an open and shut case; another Asset Flop on Steam and the story ends.

However, that is not where the story ends. After being denied Trading Card Functionality, VI Games LLC (whether connected to that event or otherwise) began to revoke game keys they had given away to 3rd parties, totalling up to at least FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND by their count, no matter whether or not those keys had been paid for by the consumer. Despite public outcry, the Dev has remained silent on all of their social media platforms.

In this critic's own opinion: STAY AWAY FROM ALL FUTURE VI GAMES LLC productions, or their other sockpuppet account, "Vi Games." For their, 'first game,' Death Penalty: Beginning is a technical fraud and failure, and how the studio has handled themselves is nothing short of a full PR disaster; disgusting and disgraceful in all manners of the word. There is no level of disdain I could express for the callous mishandling of such a PR disaster for an ultimately meaningless game that didn't even manage to crawl from the womb of original thought.

AVOID AT ALL COST.

Dev without any noticed revoked keys given away and bought from bundles. Do not support, I amask for refund now.

[I would like to start out that yes, I know that this is made (mostly) by one person which I know can be very dificult but there are a few problems I would like to address]

-Max of 5 fps when my normal gaming fps is 30
-Forget aiming let alone hitting enemys
-You cannot press a single thing right above it, instead you have to move a bit off
-Horrible, loud, constant music
-All around near unplayable game

Sadly the game is complete garbage. Going into the game I was actually excited due to the art and ads. 20 minutes into the game I had no choice but to stop and immediately uninstall. The game is very poorly optimized, incredibly glitchy, and unusually loud- without a mute sound or volume button-(REALLY??) I do not at all endorse this game, maybe with a major overhaul it could be at least playable. If the game is given a major revamp I would gladly return and give it a second chance. However, in the current state the game is useless. For actual gameplay instead of the false and misleading advertisements check out the video below.

https://youtu.be/7P3X5P-pKqU

This has a Serious Sam in the Open World of Myst Uru feel to it. Huge expansive desert canyons and hordes of zombies. There are some Big ass spiders so far. Some of these zombies will explode with a deadly gas that it will leave behind. I wasnt sure if that gas had been damaging other zombies or if it was the Spiders but it damn sure messes you up, so step around it.

There are some cool ruins with statues and caves and I found a 150 foot Robot. Im hoping I get to piolot that thing or at least control it in some way, but its not operational yet, even though there are some electrical component around it that seem in working order. I cant interact with it. Has a sweet booty ruskie chick with a pleasing accent. For some reason you get points to spend when you kill things and you can buy her clothes and play dress up if you want. I got my baby in the bikini. Makes a nice view in 3rd.

no map but does have waypoints and you cant miss them because the markers stick up out of the ground towering over most things. Those markers are visible with distance to them. You will have objectives to get to. after you take out zombies or skirt around them and hit your marker, you will get another. Right now my biggest problem is that I have to find grass for a fire and grass is every where. I cant take any of it and now I only have the shelter marker. Im missing the grass and that sort of pisses me off.

Still, its fun to explore and kill the hell out of zombies. That being said; The weapon is absolute garbage. The aim on this AR is probably the worst ive seen. you have to be (estimate) around 30 ft or less away to hit something with it. Sure you have recoil, but the first shot at least should be acurate. no way. It is frustrating to stand still and aim careful at a targets head and still miss. can be a big mistake too. At least you have unlimited ammo. your going to need it.

This game is an early access and probably very early in development. For the special price of 1.69, Hell yeah get it. Sure it has plenty of work to be done , in settings and there isnt even a control scheme layout. It tells you WASD and pretty much there are a shit load of zombies. You have a Weapon. I bet you know what to do with it.

DEVELOPER: Please consider Giving the player a weapon that we can hit something with. If I at least had that, I can easily deal with update after update and watch the story unfold. Thanks for your work and my money is already well spent.

I rescind my comment at the bottom of this that I think this may be good eventually.
The majority of the gameplay is running to checkpoints that are too far away (possibly to force the use of vehicles that are either bugged or I don't know how to use them because they require an item from the shop which doesn't have english language text) & without the vehicles it is just a war of attrition between swathes of zombie assets/some sort of ant or spider, the horrific aiming & the sheer mind numbing boredom of it all.
I had written down some Pro's but I'll save them to see if finishing whatever arduos 'gameplay' this current version outweighs their inclusion.
I have previously written that the Doctor Watson games were so buggy & boring that it felt like it was actually being aggressive towards me for paying for the game, this may get added to that list, who knows if patches during Early Access will save it from the fate of some guy not thinking it's any good; time will tell.

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*Patch has been issued addressing critiscisms I've made below, will be playing shortly to see how that moderates my feelings towards the game, so the below is no longer accurate (& in the case of misidentifying Ukrainian language as Russian, that part was never accurate to begin with & for that I am sorry.*
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After putting an additional 2 hours with the patched version & finding a lot of annoying issues that I posted into the Screenshots page for this game & will write up my notes tomorrow when for some reason I'll be playing more of this, my opinion hasn't changed at all. This could be good, but it needs a lot of fixing in the Early Access period to even approach decency.
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When a game greets me with a splash screen that the game was "mostly made by one person, I tried to make it of good quality & interesting." I'm immediately put on edge.

Then the options screen was partially in russian, so I tried changing it to the english option, but nothing changed & so I changed it to russian & realised that the english settings in this admittedly Early Access title were just 'less russian' than the russian language settings.

Then an actually pretty cinematic opening cutscene with probably unintentionally hilarious 'english' voice acting & scripting, but it's unskippable & too long & basically, you are in a plane over a desert & you get shot & crash.
You then are dumped into a long hallway with no sprint, once you get to the end of the hallway you get in the plane from the cutscene & then you wake up in the desert were you crashed in the cutscene, I guess this is either out of order or was felt to be needed Prologue, otherwise we'd just assume we were born with that plane already in the air, how else could the events have played out thusly.

Anyway, so you're in the desert. You still can't sprint & there isn't context as to where you should be going, so you wander forwards, then more hilarious voice acting & suddently a marker off to the right, so you need to slowly walk over there while one of the 2 music tracks kicks in.
You can toggle between the music tracks the 2 key & disabled with the 3 key, the game even pops up cover art & band/track info in the corner of the screen, you don't often see that in games which makes me think this developer is in or knows people in the 2 bands (the songs weren't bad & I'd say they were the best part of the game, but I'm not likely to re-spend the $4.24 that I'll be being refunded on this, to buy them).
You walk all the way back to the marker & suddenly you are in a too dark cave & can sprint finally, out of nowhere we realise that now we are free from the confines of the plane which we weren't born & raised in, that we can run freely (also there are zombies in the cave, because of course there are zombies) & it seemed like you use RMB to aim & use the flashlight, couldn't seem to use a flashlight (which is too bright & crap when I wasn't aiming) & you didn't seem to be able to sprint while aiming & then I took 2 hits and died which sent me back to the main menu to consider watching the unskippable cutscene again before slowly wandering to the caves once more.
I didn't consider it worth it.

This could be good, eventually, although I'm mainly basing that on finding the voice acting amusing; if sprint gets patched in the opening sections in the next couple of days & the opening cutscene is skippable then I probably won't return it, that's possibly a stretch, I might play it again before returning it to see if it suddenly becomes good after that short zombie gameplay in which I died, but it just feels too sluggish to do over again with 2 hits of health to end up playing yet another janky zombie shooter on Steam.