Dead as Disco Demo Impressions

My first exposure to Brain Jar Games’ Dead as Disco was through a video where someone had replaced the player character’s model with Deadpool and set the ensuing gameplay to NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye”.

I can’t exactly tell you why that managed to pique my interest¹, but it did. So here we are.

When I first booted up the publicly-available demo for this game, which is currently still in active development, I was kinda harsh on it. Dead as Disco is, at first blush, a fairly standard combat-focused action game in the vein of Insomniac’s Spider-Man games or the Batman Arkham series - something which has come to be dubbed the “free-flow action game”. Something you need to understand about the combat systems in these games is that they are designed primarily to look good and make the player feel powerful more than they are designed to actually be a meaningfully deep or engaging mechanical challenge; basic attacks have the ability to home in on enemies from almost anywhere in the play space and can be cancelled at any time into perfect dodges or counters against very brightly telegraphed enemy attacks, meaning that the player never has to commit to anything or even really think about their positioning all that hard when navigating combat encounters. Free-flow action works for a lot of people, but not so much for me, at least not as much as it did when I was a teenager and thought being able to basically teleport between mostly passive goons made me “feel like Batman.” But what helps this combat framework not feel overly dry in these games is that it’s just part of the game. Spider-Man and Batman Arkham have a lot more things to hold your attention, from environmental exploration to light puzzle solving and even RPG-esque upgrade trees. Dead as Disco is basically just the combat system. So how does Brain Jar Games take this combat framework and make it the whole game in a way that actually keeps it interesting? Pretty simply, actually.

Dead as Disco is a rhythm game.

The Combat

I’m not being coy or smart or anything like that - it is literally a rhythm game. Dead as Disco’s entire mechanical conceit is effectively to marry the free-flow action combat framework with the rhythmic sensibilities of a game like Hi-Fi Rush. Your standard gameplay vocabulary consists of a basic attack, a counter attack, a dodge, a dedicated finisher attack for sufficiently damaged enemies, a ranged attack that pulls you towards far away enemies, a charged attack which can launch enemies or guard break the small handful that can block, and a couple of resource-driven options: a “rush” attack which can be held to deal a whole bunch of hits to the nearest enemy at the cost of a meter (charged by landing regular hits), and a “takedown” attack which instantly kills whichever enemy you’re targeting at the cost of a separate meter (charged by landing hits, including with the rush attack). At a base level, there’s already some pretty thoughtful balancing taking place with these options: the ranged attack exists specifically to hit far away enemies since the range on your basic attack is limited enough that you can’t backflip from one end of the arena to the other; you effectively become invincible when using counters and finishers which gives you some leeway to get a bearing on your situation and plan your response (or shield yourself from paritcularly tricky enemies); and there is a pretty basic but functional interplay between the rush meter and the finisher meter - use basic attacks to fill the rush meter, use rush attacks as part of your combos to fill the finisher meter, use finishers to take down certain enemies, repeat from step 1. Of course, what really holds this combat system together, and what elevates it from something that just looks cool to an actually compelling and meaningfully challenging video game, is the fact that you’ve gotta do all this to the beat.

I’m not kidding when I say that making a rhythm game out of this combat framework fixes basically every problem I have with the combat of the games that inspired Dead as Disco. At times, it feels more like an arcade rhythm game disguised as an action game than the other way around: the need to stay on beat with all of your actions means that every single option is valuable (as opposed to its inspirations, which mostly just feel like games where you’re waiting to use your counter attack), and there’s a fairly complex scoring system with points awarded based on per-hit judgement windows and usage of special actions like rush attacks, finishers, takedowns and even the special taunt that performs one of a few dance moves on command. Counters and dodges also fulfil a unique and thoughtful role in the scoring system - some enemies have attacks which can only be dodged, but most can either be countered or dodged. As a general rule, the perfect dodge into riposte is worth more points² than the counter, but also has a much stricter timing window and - at least as far as I can tell - can’t be performed in the middle of an attack animation the way counters can, which means how you approach each round of combat requires some level of planning as well as improvisation as you balance keeping up your combo with maybe holding back your attack on the next beat so you can perfect dodge for better point return.

The combo system becomes extra important for scoring thanks to the existence of a score multiplier which scales up with your current combo, but slowly falls back down to 1.0 as you stop hitting things. Importantly, it’s extremely easy to drop your combo, since not only will the combo counter reset if you take a hit, it also resets if you whiff an attack, meaning you have to constantly be aware of where each enemy is and what they’re doing so you don’t misplace an attack and kill your score multiplier. It’s maybe the simplest and most rote aspect of the scoring system, but it’s also the only reason I came around on the game at all, because my desire to chase high scores and even full combos was what made me realise just how much of a rhythm game Dead as Disco is.

The Sights and Sounds

Dead as Disco employs a pretty standard 80s neon visual style with lots of heavy highlights and shadows on characters and environments to contrast with the bright pastel blues, pinks and yellows. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but it also looks good! I don’t really have much more to say about it because visual art is not really my forte. That said, here is probably a good place to mention that the on-hit visual effects for attacks in this game are perfect: hitsparks become more pronounced as you more closely match tempo, and the hitstop on successful attacks is tuned well enough that it helps sell the impact of your attacks without forcing you into awkward beat timings. I can only imagine this kind of tuning must be really tricky to get right, so the fact that Brain Jar got it so right is something worth lauding.

The game also sounds amazing. Hitsounds follow the same beat as the hitsparks, increasing in volume and intensity as you more closely match tempo, and it further adds to the sense of weight and impact in the combat that helps it do maybe the most important thing it could do, which is feel god damn awesome when you’re on a roll. There’s plenty of other strong visual and aural indicators which tell you what’s going on and help provide feedback for your actions, but a cool thing it does is keep it sutble: there’s no visual guide to where the beat is, and so you’re just kind of expected to either stay on beat the whole time or use clues from the core gameplay to find the beat and keep it up from there, and the way the game’s visuals and sounds are designed contribute a lot to letting that kind of hands-off approach be functional and feel rewarding.

Of course, the star of the show has to be the music, and the demo comes with a selection of original tracks in various styles from synth-heavy metal to hip hop to Korean and Japanese style pop, though the whole soundtrack skews electronic. For the demo, the game places front and centre its rock cover of Michael Sembello’s classic, “Maniac.”

This is used in the single level from the main story campaign, which shows off the ways the game is willing to mess around with its presentation, employing special counters to match specific moments in the song, a fight in a train tunnel with oncoming trains you have to dodge, and a fight on one of those trains that mimics the visual stylings of a side-scrolling beat ’em up game. There are a lot of large and small presentational touches which show off a lot of the game’s artistic sensibilities - Dead as Disco absolutely benefits from a more choreographed level structure to show off its palpable sense of style.

Most of the music isn’t really my sort of thing, to be honest. It’s not bad, just not my style. But that’s okay, because on top of being Batman Arkham meets Hi-Fi Rush, Dead as Disco is also the new Audiosurf.

The Infinite Disco

The primary mode of play for the demo is “The Infinite Disco”, a free play mode where you pick a song and the game just throws waves of enemies at you until the song ends. This is where most of the game’s replay value comes from: the songs that come packed in with the game have official online score leaderboards, and scoring gains an extra scruple by way of having to balance moment-to-moment scoring with the need to clear waves quickly. But, of course, the main draw of the Infinite Disco is the ability to add your own songs to the game’s library. Because Dead as Disco’s rhythmic aspect is driven almost entirely by tempo, the game doesn’t have to put in any effort to create a “chart” or anything of the sort, instead spawning waves of enemies in a set pattern based on the song.³ The game also comes with a robust set of tools for tuning a song, allowing you to set a custom BPM and even a beat offset to ensure the game’s internal metronome lines up with the timing of the song. There are still times where it can feel a little imprecise (some songs have caused me a ton of trouble with a seemingly correct BPM still having the metronome desync with the beat) and its advanced editor can’t account for changes in BPM mid-song, but it’s still an incredibly valuable and welcome set of tools for tuning custom songs. The game recommends running songs that measure somewhere between 120-200 BPM for animation timing reasons, but I find that a higher BPM works better for animation speed and general game feel, and a bunch of my custom songs effectively have their BPM set to double time for that reason. It leads to some gameplay sequences that look and feel god damn amazing, though.

The Suggestions

So we’re in a pretty good spot for an early pre-release demo. The developers are actively taking feedback, and I’ve already submitted mine to them, but I should probably outline what I want here, as well. Most of my suggestions are for small things, mostly related to the scoring mechanics: the main thing I want is a more detailed post-game score breakdown, as well as better feedback in game for when combos are dropped. The rules regarding when the game drops combos are reasonably clear, but there are still times where I’m left wondering why the combo dropped at all. I’d also like to see slightly more granular options for song editing such as allowing for BPM changes, but that might genuinely be too much effort to implement for how much it would matter to most people. Most of my suggestions aren’t really a high priority.

The Verdict

I didn’t think I was capable of being excited for new game releases at all. I’m kind of a grouchy old fart. But I sure am glad I found that fateful Deadpool video, because Dead as Disco is a game I have found myself genuinely looking forward to. While it’s not particularly complex as an action game unto itself, the mechanical context of being a rhythm game adds a whole ton of variety and thoughtfulness to the free-flow action combat mechanics, elevating both its mechanical complexity and its game feel. I didn’t really get into it a whole lot, but seriously, when the you’re online with the right song, this game feels absolutely god damn incredible to play. Even if you’re not into free-flow action games otherwise, if you like rhythm games, you will probably get a lot out of Dead as Disco. If the demo is anything to go by, it’s absolutely going to be worth your time. I know I’m going to sink a whole bunch of time into it myself!