We humans are a sick bunch, aren’t we? We relish in our Mortal Kombats, Call of Duties and Gears of Wars to serve us our daily gore. Sick! But sometimes we desire damnation and gore in a more cutesy fashion. We’ve had Lemmings, Happy Tree Friends and now it seems even sweet zombie like critters aren’t safe. 101 Ways to Die is a sinister yet colourful experience where killing in the most inventive and gruesome ways possible earns you top points and the recognition you desire from your mum and dad. That is before they sent you off to a therapist.
101 Ways to Die is darkly humoured puzzle platformer, where players are tasked to aid a mad scientist in creating a host of ways to kill off various zombie lackeys. All of this “research” is to be used for a new book by said mad scientist called … well 101 Ways to Die silly. Or it should be called 101 to kill poor innocent zombie creatures like a sicko! You’ll explore a range of methods that include burning, exploding, impaling and squashing those poor test subjects. But everything is in a cartoony fashion so it’s ok to laugh.
Players are given a location and a number of traps to aid in their destruction. It’s your job to figure out the most effective manner to kill off a group of zombie critters and make it as stylish as possible. The more points you earn, the better the ranking and to pull off high marks, items such as spring traps, pools of slime, bombs and cannons can be used by themselves or help set off chain reactions with larger traps in the environment for bigger spectacles of violence. Environmental objects such as a bed of spikes, lava pits and huge boulders that squish anything will result in easier ways to tackle large groups and rack up the points when used with smaller traps.
101 Ways to Die is quite frankly a fun concept and offers a sickly sweet puzzle game that has a twisted and wacky sense of humour. The one element that drew me in most about this game (and in some respects annoyed me too) is the organic nature and unpredictable reactions. Setting a spring trap for instance will never have the same effect twice; this is caused by environmental factors and even small adjustments to the traps can cause a different reaction. It’s hugely enjoyable seeing the critters bounce off the walls or have a completely disastrous chain reaction happen. It can be slightly annoying as well when objects such as cannons have differing effects/reaction in each round, even when the cause if actually the same. Pin point accuracy or just plain old luck is needed just to pull off a successful kill or chain reaction. This is not so much a problem early in the game, but towards the end, with some restrictive and difficult mission objectives, this does factor in some painful and repetitive trial and error situations.
There is a great deal of missions to dive into and a steady difficulty curve for most of the game. After a few slow introduction missions, the game does become very engaging. 101 Ways To Die is satisfying when everything goes right and the rewards feel justly. Setting off the larger set pieces and traps with a chain reaction is the highlight of the game’s design and figuring out some of the larger traps and getting the timing just right offers the most interesting challenges. I personally found a majority of the game to be fairly easy, but I’m pretty much a puzzle buff. Some missions did have me at a standstill for some time while many others made it too easy to guess how or what was meant to happen. Seeing a boulder on a ramp does give it away and eliminates a large chunk of the guesswork gameplay. Regardless of the easier missions, I had fun pulling off some insanely wild deaths. Some layouts made it too clear what to do, but other missions still require you to figure out how to create the perfect chain reaction.
But this structure of “puzzle solving” constricts a large majority of freedom the player would have in carrying out the kills. Of course you can place your traps anywhere on the map, but often there are certain and precise ways to carry out the big set pieces. You can mess around with the traps given to you, but using these by themselves isn’t as effective, nor really offers as much entertainment. After some time 101 Ways to Die feels a little too much like a game of mouse trap or worse a jigsaw puzzle. It’s fun to figure out and put the pieces together, but the creativity aspect is sucked out and you’re left feeling your completion was effortless.
Not to mention that for a game called 101 Ways to Die, the deaths and tactics become a little over used and tedious. We see the same types of traps and finales over and over again until it just gets boring. The game does introduce new elements such as new NPCs and level interactions, but these are too fair and few in-between to keep things fresh.
Overall, 101 Ways to Die is a fun, casual puzzle game if you’re in the mood for some mindless and gruesome fun. Don’t expect a hard-core challenge like Portal and don’t expect something that allows a huge amount of creative flow such as Orcs Must Die. But none the less, it’s simple, funny and good to kill some time for those lateral thinkers such as me.
An Xbox One code of 101 Ways To Die was provided by Four Door Lemon for the purpose of this review.
101 Ways To Die
$14.99
Pros
- Joyous gruesome fun!
- High replay value
- Some entertaining chain reactions
Cons
- Repetative
- Some level layouts make it too easy to solve the problem
- Needs a little more variation in traps
