Dead Weight Review. A Tactical Roguelike Where It's Fun to Knock Enemies Off a Cliff

You hover your mouse over a goblin, click, and shove it. The goblin flies into a wooden crate, the crate ricochets into another mob, and that one goes sailing off the edge of the map with a dull scream, straight into the void. At first, it's fun. You're standing on the deck of a flying ship. Under your control is a guy named Arm — he's the main fighter here, with a whopping three hit points — and a girl named Cranberry, who's more of a navigator and doesn't really get into fights at the start. Then a mob of red-haired weirdos with hooks jumps onto your ship. They slickly steal your Cranberry, inform you that you've been kissed by God, and toss you out to deal with it. Basically, the entire first mission is about tracking down your stolen girl, while the game quietly teaches you not to fall off the edge of the arena along the way.

The islands here come in different flavors. You fly up on your ship and see the difficulty — one star, two stars. That determines how many enemies are waiting for you on that little patch of land. There are basic goblins that just charge in and swing. There are ones who lob grenades from a distance, and also just plain long-range attackers. And then there are event islands. You dock — and get offered healing, a top-up of fuel, or a gifted artifact you can later use in combat. The artifact's ability goes into a separate slot, next to Arm's two default skills — "push" and "hit."

The ship runs on fuel. To travel across the global map from island to island, you need gas. Farming it isn't hard. You hover your cursor over the icon on the map, and it tells you plainly where that fuel drops from. Clear out the right islands, get gas. Sometimes you pick up oil barrels too. They just sit dead weight in the ship's hold, and you can use them any time to refuel on the go.

But the strangest part kicks in when the tank runs dry and there are no barrels left. The ship stalls. Drifting begins. You just hang there in the sky, the screen flickers, and a text box pops up: "You drifted for two days." Why I need to know it was two days specifically, I still haven't figured out. And during that drift, you might just get pushed toward a random island. Or other flying ships might attack you. This isn't presented as a proper tactical battle on the map — it's a text event instead.

And in general, from the very start of the game, your inventory has these odd resources rattling around in it. Three cannons, three shields, and three... bananas. Seriously, there's an icon that looks exactly like a banana. That item teleports you to the city. And when you get attacked while drifting, a window pops up: you can try to slip away from the enemy ship. It costs you a cannon or a shield. If you're out of resources, you go into the fight and, most likely, take a beating.

Later, once the city expands, you're allowed to buy fuel with dollars at the dock station — a quarter tank, half a tank, a full tank. My tank was 200 units. You can even buy a spare can worth 100 units just in case. And if you're completely broke, you can go work for it: pick the option to labor, get handed 10 coins, but also get slapped with two units of exhaustion.

The city is your hub. It's packed with buildings: a tavern, a temple, a lighthouse, a shrine, and some kind of techno-structure. They unlock gradually as you complete objectives. The tavern shows up first. That's where you buy a replacement for your stolen Cranberry, since there's nothing to do alone out on the islands.

Your squad can have a max of three people, but only two slots are available at first. And this is where the pain starts. Your starting character, Arm, has three hit points. A mercenary from the tavern has one. One hit point is basically a walking corpse. You can hire a cabin boy, then the tavern's roster rotates in a skilled cabin boy, a gunner, a cook. Some are tankier, but they also cost more. You buy them with coins you knock out of mobs on the islands. If one of your hired hands dies in battle — and with one HP, that happens regularly — they take every piece of equipment they're wearing straight into the grave with them. All the gear you bought burns along with them.

But the most controversial part of the game is healing. At some point, I unlocked the medicine vendor. By the endgame, I had so much money I didn't know what to do with it. I bought up all the bandages, refreshed the shop's stock, bought up more bandages. Stuffed them into every character's inventory before a fight.

And here's how the medicine works: if a bandage is sitting in Arm's backpack, only Arm can be healed with it. You can be standing right next to a half-dead ally with your pockets full of med kits, and you still can't patch up your teammate's wounds. The ability to heal allies belongs to exactly one class of mercenary — the cook. If there's no cook in your squad, everyone dies alone with their own personal med kit.

Kill the first boss and you unlock a stat called "Madness." Sounds like a debuff, but in practice it's a wildly useful mechanic. Madness builds up from various actions in combat. For example, if you technically knock an enemy off a ledge into the void, the counter climbs. I built mine up to 216%.

What does that actually get you in practice? Tentacles start spawning on the map. Right along the perimeter of the arena. And some flowers show up too. They hit an area — a cross-shaped pattern spanning several tiles. The neat part is that these tentacles and flowers damage not just you, but the enemies too. I won half of the tough fights simply by pushing tanky mobs onto tiles that a tentacle was about to hit. Mechanics like this are exactly what bring Dead Weight closer to classic turn-based tactics games, where victory depends less on your heroes' stats and more on smart positioning. If you're into that kind of gameplay, we'd recommend checking out our list of best tactical games for PC and consoles: Top 24 turn-based tactics games and TRPGs. It's genuinely useful. Though honestly, I never noticed much difference between 100% and 216% madness. You'd get two or three tentacles per fight either way; that didn't change.

There's also a forge in the city. To unlock it, you need to find 10 possession stones scattered across the islands. At the forge, you increase the rarity of your gear. The mechanic will make you sweat. You have possession crystals — you drop a piece of gear into the slot, pour in crystals. You need to hit somewhere around a 90-100% success chance. If the chance is lower and the craft fails, the item breaks and disappears forever. I always poured in resources until I was scraped dry, just so I wouldn't end up with nothing.

Gear is split into top, bottom, and weapon. I managed to get epic fists: they give two abilities — a left hook and a right hook. And you not only hit but also stun whoever's standing next to you. If you equip a two-handed axe, it takes up two slots at once. By default, you have two action points per turn — push, hit. Later on, my ranged character got a third action point, but it only worked on the very first turn of a fight. After that, back to two.

There's also an "R" button in the game. It's a reroll for the turn, given to you once per island. It breaks the game — in a good way. When you reroll, mobs spawn on different tiles, not the ones they were originally standing on.

There was a moment where I was cornered, Arm down to one HP and one point of armor, my partner also at exactly one HP. The next turn was a guaranteed death. I hit "R" purely out of desperation. The enemies reshuffled, the layout changed, and I cleared that fight on the first try.

To get your stolen Cranberry back, you need to find the mob holding her hostage. Kill that mob, and Cranberry unlocks as a playable character. I started a second full run playing as her. She's a ranged character. Her attacks are all built around firearms.

At the start, playing as her was physically painful. She can't shoot in melee range, so you have to constantly retreat. And the maps in this game are tiny, roughly the size of a battle royale zone right before the match ends (more on topic: games like PUBG for Android and iOS). Water barrels and crates constantly get in the way (at least you can push or break those), but the worst are the rocks. Rocks don't break. You try to line up a clean shot, and there's a boulder sticking out right in front of you.

But in the late game, Cranberry turns into a machine. After you kill the second boss, enemies become nearly unkillable. Mobs get 12-16 HP plus partial armor. And that's exactly when the ranged character starts wrecking things: I built her a killer gun with 4 base damage. She has a passive — damage scales up the further away you're standing. The farther you stand, the harder you hit. She also has her own buff ability. You walk to the opposite end of the tiny map, pop the buff, shoot — and take off 12 damage in a single hit. All that's left is to finish off the remaining 3-4 HP with your second action.

To make it easier to find the islands you need, the city has a lighthouse keeper. You walk up to him, pay two coins. That unlocks a spyglass. You aim it at a fog-covered area on the global map and hit spacebar, and the fog clears.

All this island-hopping and dock-station labor racks up exhaustion. Build up 10 units, and you fall into the abyss. The game starts over. God kisses you again, tells you that you still haven't finished your work, and dumps you back in the starting zone. Zero money, no companions, no gear. Everything reset to zero. You can shed exhaustion at the tavern: pay 100 gold, remove 10 units of exhaustion. Obviously, it's better not to push it to the limit. In general, Dead Weight doesn't hold back and regularly punishes you for mistakes. If you like projects that genuinely put up a fight, check out our list of the hardest games of all time: TOP-35.

But it wasn't exhaustion that killed me. There are three bosses in the game. The first sits on an island that looks visually a bit different from the others — same skull motif, but a different island model. The second boss works the same way (and turned out easier than the first). But I got completely stuck on the third boss — the Kraken.

I flew around half the map: no island with a skull anywhere. But right in the middle of the screen, floating in empty space, was a giant Kraken model. I had no idea how to start the fight — in the end, I just flew my ship straight into the Kraken's texture, and it worked. The boss fight kicked off instantly.

The only problem was, right before that I'd been clearing a regular island, and my team's HP was nearly at zero. The bandages were sitting in the inventories of characters who didn't need healing, while the ones on death's door had empty medicine slots. And I lost the run — a run that had lasted two and a half hours. Fell into the abyss. By the way, you can actually descend there voluntarily through the menu, but apparently that works as a full restart.

Down in the abyss, I found the meta-progression system. Ancient points, earned through events or by praying at the temple, get spent on global talents. There are a full six talent branches. There's a scouting branch that extends your ship's viewing radius, and a knowledge branch. You can also unlock the remaining characters there — there are four in total, and they unlock the same way Cranberry did, by killing a captor mob.

I looked at those locked talents and realized I didn't really want to unlock them anymore. Despite its roguelike structure, Dead Weight is fundamentally built around strategy and managing a small squad. If you're into games like that, we'd also recommend checking out our list of the best strategy games on PC: TOP-40. I clocked eight hours over three days. The islands are visually pretty much the same. You walk into a combat zone, and the assets are identical — just with mobs generated on different tiles. The pushing mechanic is fun, the tentacles work well, and the damage numbers pop off satisfyingly. But by hour eight, trudging across the same patches of rocky land starts to get old.