A few months ago I noticed a new early access game on Steam called Deadside, and it looked really interesting to me. I personally have never played DayZ or H1Z1, and this looked very similar to those games but without the zombies.
I’m always really cautious when buying early access games, since they are often filled with glitches and horrible optimization.
So I bought Deadside and started playing it a bit, and a bunch of my friends saw it and immediately wanted to play it with me. I really like the game, but there are a few things about it that definitely need fleshing out before release.
The gameplay of Deadside is very similar to other games like it in that you spend time looting buildings and collecting resources in a large open world.
I’m going to give my opinions about Deadside, and let you know if I think it’s worth buying or just passing up on.
Graphics
The first thing you’ll notice in Deadside is how great the game looks. This isn’t Red Dead 2 level of graphics, but the lighting and textures are very impressive for an early access game. A lot of times I’ll be running through the forest and I’ll go into third person and just look around at all the beautiful scenery.
All of the guns look great too, and the helmets and clothing items all look high quality. I really don’t have any complaints about the graphics at all. The optimization was insanely good for a game this early in development.
When you look at the graphics and smoothness of the gameplay, it honestly doesn’t look like an early access game. However, once you start playing more you’ll realize that the game is lacking many features that are yet to be released.
Combat
Deadside is somewhat like Rust in that the biggest threats to you are the other players in the world. There are NPC’s that can kill you if you aren’t careful, but you should always be on the lookout for other players.
Sometimes enemy patrols will wander the streets, or soldiers at the military bases will attack you, but PvP combat is what the game is all about. There have been many times where I’ve been randomly shot at in the woods, causing me to get behind cover and figure out where the shots are coming from.
NPCs sometimes have laser accuracy which is a bit annoying, but if it’s another player shooting at you then you’ll have some pretty fun shootouts.
All the guns that I’ve used so far feel great, and they remind me of PUBG guns a little bit. The whole game and combat system reminds me of PUBG actually, which I really liked about it.
Every kill you get is incredibly satisfying, especially when it’s another player with a lot of loot.
The weapons feel good to fire, and when you manage to get a better gun it gives you a greater sense of security, but at the same time you’re more worried about dying and losing your gear.
There are a bunch of different guns that you can either buy from the shop, loot from enemies, or get from events. The guns at the shop are extremely expensive, and are not really worth buying when you can just go loot them from enemies
I found that if you want to get decent guns early on, you can head to one of the military bases, and killing the enemies there will give you really decent guns such as AKs and tactical shotguns.
Going to these bases first will get you some good gear that will let you survive a whole lot easier than before. Sometimes I feel like looting guns from buildings is kind of useless after you’ve gotten better weapons from bases.
Ammo seems to be all over the place, and there are so many types that it’s hard to keep up with them all. I never really seem to run out of ammo either, since I can just buy it at the shop if I’m low on it. I usually end up having to throw out tons of ammo to conserve inventory space, or combine ammo stacks to 100 rounds and then sell them at the shop.
Overall, the combat is the best part of the game and the main reason to get it.
Looting
Besides combat, (and a lot of running) you’ll spend a lot of time looting building and cities. It feels a lot like most games of this genre, but also has the same feeling PUBG does with its looting. The main difference here is that you can hoard the loot in storages and at your base, so it makes looting more enjoyable since there are more purposes for it besides guns.
There’s a crafting system to the game that isn’t the greatest, and can often get annoying at times. Crafting bandages and small items is fun, but when it comes to the base component crafting it’s tedious and borin g.
You need to do a lot of looting to get pieces for crafting, or to get money with which you can use to buy crafting components. There are a bunch of different cities around the map, as well as random buildings and small towns.
Looting is a really huge part of the game, and it was enjoyable while I was playing it. I could see it becoming boring after many hours, but since the game isn’t done yet I hope it’ll only improve from here.
World
When I opened up the world map for the first time, I was surprised at how large the world was for an early access game, but then I zoomed out and realized that this is only a tiny section of what they’re going to add in the future. A lot of the map is just trees and forest areas, but the map has enough variety to it to make it seem believable.
Base Building
The worst part about Deadside so far is how tedious the base building is. The first thing you need to do is to actually find a spot to build. You’re not able to place anywhere remotely near landmarks or other players, and it took us close to an hour to find a spot to build. There should at least be an option to see available build sites on the map, but instead I had to run around carrying the building plot sign and waiting for it to turn green.
When we finally found a place to build, we found it to be extremely tedious to make the components. One person needed to be chopping tons of logs (which by the way you can chop trees indefinitely and they’ll never fall), another person was crafting them into components, and the third was figuring out the layout of the base.
It felt like forever but we finally had a small base going, but then we realized that we couldn’t put one of the walls down because of an incline. So, we dismantled the base and continued looking for another one, but eventually gave up.
In its current state, base building is so annoying that I prefer to keep my best gear at the safe zone storage and forget about building altogether. I bet there are some people who enjoy the building, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but to me I just wasn’t interested in it.
Events
Sometimes events will pop up around the world where you need to survive waves of enemies, and if you do then you’re rewarded with some good gear. The harder the difficulty of the mission, the higher quality the gear will be.
Events are really fun to do, but the harder ones can be frustrating if other players are also competing for the gear. The PvP of Deadside is awesome, but sometimes the combination of players and NPCs fighting you at the same time can get annoying.
The good news is that if you manage to survive a hard event, you’ll get some awesome gear that you can either sell or put in storage for later.
Verdict
So my final verdict of the game is that if you enjoy survival PvP games, Deadside is a buy. It usually goes for around $20 on Steam, and it’s surprisingly polished for an early access game.
There are a lot of things that need to be changed, but there’s a ton of content planned and I’m excited to see what new content is added in the future.
