Let It Die Review

I also enjoyed the premise of blueprints. Pick up a blueprint and return it to the hub in the basement of the building — reachable via elevators you encounter in-game, if you've got the cash — and give it to the weapons dealer, and you'll be able to craft it again on all of your characters, meaning you don't start entirely from scratch each time you create a new character.

There are a couple of infuriating aspects. Your weapons and items will break after just a handful of hits, meaning if you get unlucky with item drops — something that happens reasonably often — you'll be stuck running around the place in the nude, which is challenging to say the least, and it's also annoying to find a shiny new weapon or piece of armour and know that you'll have it for 10 minutes or so before it literally falls off you in combat.


This is a shame because the weapons are fun and unique, offering different ways to approach combat. It's more of a shame because the armour, whether it's ridiculous yellow trousers or a traffic cone sat atop your head, is interesting, and your character looks cool — or appropriately ridiculous — when you're wearing the stuff.

After the training wheels come off, the free-to-play aspects feel much more predatory. The only thing you can spend money on here are respawns, but for those familiar with Dark Souls and its ilk, you know quite how many respawns you'll need. One boss took me 30 attempts, while one particular corridor, just a tricky corridor, cost me 15 lives. The learning curve of the Souls games has always been part of the appeal, but this doesn't apply when every time you die you have to either spend some premium currency or roll up a new character and spend time getting yourself ready to try the boss again.


It's not mean-spirited, of course; the game is free and you're given a lot of premium currency to start off with, and for a free game it's really very generous. It's just that after a while you start to succumb to the attrition of Let It Die, both by being worn down by the game's clunky combat, zaniness and tough battles, but also a very literal type of attrition, as your premium currency starts to run out and the game starts asking you to dig into your pockets.

For the Souls fans, this is a game that's going to reward and nourish them, with skills learnt over the course of those games making the learning experience a little less punishing and a little cheaper. For the more casual players though, when you start to run out of premium currency, you'll start to understand why the game is entitled Let It Die.