When I was a younger, angrier, and dumber person, I spent more hours than I’d like to admit surfing some of the seedier parts of the internet. During these long sessions, I was often watching, reading about, or seeking out some of the violent, disturbing, or horrific videos people shared online as part of the then-popular race to post the most horrible, edgy stuff possible on places like LiveLeak, 4chan, and SomethingAwful. I’ve long since grown up and realized how terrible it is to consume that crap. But I’ll never forget some of the shit I saw.
Because of that experience, I know that new revenge shooter Better Than Dead, out now on Steam, has some of the most realistic-looking gunplay I’ve ever seen in a game. In fact, it sometimes looks and sounds so real that I almost feel a little gross playing the newly released bodycam FPS. But unlike those videos on LiveLeak, Better Than Dead is a video game featuring faceless, digital baddies. So I can enjoy the action movie amount of carnage and the tense, heart-pounding gunplay found in each level. The kind of combat that had me turning and wiggling in my seat as I desperately tried to get out of harm’s way.
Better Than Dead is a very simple game. You play as a young woman who escapes from a terrible situation involving armed men and forced sex work. This escape happens when she is delivered a pistol. Using this gun, she gets out and then decides to go on a revenge tour to free other women and kill the people running the underground network of brothels, clubs, and trafficking operations exploiting them.
As she fights back, she records her revenge spree on a body cam, which provides Better Than Dead’s FPS perspective. This isn’t the first game to use a bodycam view, but Better Than Dead uses it as a way to repackage the game’s action as some horrible video that’s been shared online. Faces, nudity, and other parts of the game are blurred and pixelated. It’s like you have found these videos on some website, downloaded them, and are watching them after someone else has edited them and made them just clean enough to share on some horrible part of Reddit or Facebook.
Simple and brutal
And… that’s it. That’s the game. There are no RPG skill trees, open world segments, or even different guns to collect and upgrade. Each level is just you showing up with a pistol and the goal of killing the criminal in charge at that location or saving a woman involved in the operations. It’s a very minimalistic approach to game design that matches Better Than Dead‘s lack of a HUD, objective markers, or even an aiming reticle. The end result is a game that looks like actual body cam footage of a person with a pistol running through dilapidated apartments, hotels, and clubs on the search for more goons to blast.
Combat in Better Than Dead, like everything else, is very stripped down and presented as realistically as possible. Guns are loud, and aiming is messy. Lining up shots on targets more than 10 feet away is tricky. Firefights either end quickly, with a few wild shots fired in just a second or two, or go on as both you and the enemies you encounter miss shots and hit walls or other obstacles that litter each level. The main character staggers and sways around corners while aiming and shooting. A single gunshot can drop most enemies, but can also slow you down, and another shot will usually leave you dead as well.
Every time I rounded a corner or entered a hallway in Better Than Dead, I would whip around to make sure nobody was sneaking up on me or trying to catch me off guard. And when I did encounter a thug, I’d blast them with more than a few shots because accuracy almost feels random at times, and you have unlimited ammo, so pumping enemies full of bullets is often the best tactic to ensure they fall and don’t get back up. Sometimes injured enemies would get back up, so I’d be forced to take shots at wriggling bodies as I crept through some dirty room or hall, nervous about what I was going to stumble upon in the next area.
Rough, but real
I remember, during those dark hours spent looking at terrible things online, I’d sometimes watch clips of real gunfights recorded by soldiers or other people and shared online. The thing that stuck with me was how, unlike in games and most movies, gunfights in real life were messy and frantic. Nobody wants to be shot at. Everybody is trying to hide behind cover, and accuracy isn’t as important as just firing shots in the direction of the target. Hopefully one of them hits. And even when it would, they’d still be on edge because who knows if your shot killed the enemy or just dropped them for a moment.
Better Than Dead, unlike nearly every other shooter I’ve played, tries to capture that panicked, terrified frenzy of a real gunfight. And it mostly succeeds, but it’s not without issues and bugs. Sometimes, the enemy AI would break or react oddly.
There were moments when I’d get stuck on a corner, or I’d end up shooting a wall even though my gun wasn’t close to it. There are also NPC civilians in most levels, and shooting them punishes you greatly, so when they’d randomly turn around during a firefight and run back into the building filled with gunmen and bodies and get clipped, I’d end up sighing and restarting. I’ve also seen some complaints about motion sickness caused by the way the camera sways and the fisheye lens effect, though this wasn’t a problem for me. I did encounter some performance issues that forced me to turn down the settings to get Better Than Dead running smoothly.
These moments and problems were annoying and can make some levels harder to finish than others. Still, that all said, I think Better Than Dead offers up a tense and sometimes terrifying shooter experience that isn’t interested in giving you a cool experience, but instead wants to make you feel dirty and scared each time you pull out your gun and start shooting. It might not be the best FPS I’ve played this year–and you can finish the current version in about an hour, so it’s short, too-but it will certainly stick with me longer than a lot of those other games. Like so many of those terrible videos I watched as a dumb teenager back in the day, it’s burned into my brain.
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