Die With Glory review
:: NO SLEEP TILL VALHALLAPrice: $2.99
Version: 1.2.0
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2
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In Die With Glory, you're trying to do exactly what the title suggests. You play as an old Viking warrior who wants to make sure he dies with honor on the battlefield. It's an odd premise for a game, for sure, but even more peculiar might be the mechanics and structure that make this premise work. Die With Glory is an odd game that takes throws a bunch of new ideas at the classic point-and-click adventure framework, some of which are good, others not so much.
Long life, tall tales
When you get down to it, Die With Glory is a point-and-click adventure game that is broken up into self-contained episodes. Each scene is a story that your Viking hero is recounting about how he nearly made it into Valhalla, and your task is to wander these environments, gather items, and solve puzzles to meet the criteria of the story.
Most of these stories involve finding a weapon, encountering a boss, and attempting to die facing it, but not always. In fact, many of the stories in Die With Glory have alternate versions you can go back and complete. This then can unlock new alternate versions of later stories to playthrough, which can get pretty zany.
Deadly un-serious
For a game about death, Die With Glory approaches the subject in a pretty lighthearted way. The game sports a colorful aesthetic and a solid sense of humor. This extends out into the game's mission design too, as you'll do things like fight a suit of armor full of hamsters and befriend a vegetarian dragon throughout your adventures.
Oddly though, this playful tone is disrupted every time you finish a level. At these moments, the game cuts to black and white cutscenes that have much more gravitas than the rest of the game. I don't necessarily dislike these cutscenes, but they are strange, and I'm not sure why they're in the game. It just makes the experience feel even more disjointed than it already is.
New tricks for an old dog
It doesn't take too terribly long to finish Die With Glory. Even when going back to replay alternate versions of stories, it's not terribly hard to finish the game in a few sittings. That said, you may find yourself struggling to get through some stories in the game because Die With Glory shoehorns some action-based gameplay into its point-and-click adventure formula, which mostly just feels really clunky. This is exacerbated by the fact that Die With Glory has some jittery movement to it, which can make reacting to things extremely difficult.
Thankfully, the devs of Die With Glory seem to realize that their game isn't conducive to some of the things they ask players to do in it. If you die enough on an action sequence enough times, a button pops up offering to make things easier, which is something I opted for every time I encountered it. These action sequences are yet another thing in Die With Glory that just doesn't really fit it.
The bottom line
Die With Glory feels like a game that just has too many ideas going on it. It's got a great conceit and neat episodic structure, but these things get hampered by strange cutscenes and action sequences that feel completely out of sync with the rest of the game's design. These things don't render Die With Glory unplayable, or even unenjoyable, but they are extremely noticeable weaknesses in an otherwise unique and endearing adventure game.