Better Than Dead is the second game from a small studio called Monte Gallo, published by MicroProse, and it launched into Early Access on May 12 wearing its gimmick right on its sleeve: you're playing back a bodycam recording, fisheye lens and all, of a woman who got out of a trafficking operation with nothing but a pistol and decided filming her own revenge was part of the plan. The Hong Kong setting is doing a lot of work here — neon corridors, cramped apartments, the kind of seedy geography that's clearly been raised on 80s and 90s HK action cinema rather than any modern shooter template, rendered through photogrammetry so it all has that slightly-too-real documentary sheen. Nice touch for gun nerds, the main character is using a Type 54 Norinco Pistol, a Chinese copy of the Russian Tokarev TT-33, also known as Blackstar -
Mechanically it strips down to almost nothing. One gun, unlimited ammo, no HUD, no reticule — you line up shots by eye through an ADS that never quite promises you'll land them. Get hit once and your vision blurs and the gun starts swaying harder, which turns every subsequent shot into a bet against your own hands. Slide and you get a half-second of bullet time, just enough to feel like an advantage and just short enough that you can't actually plan around it.
That's the part that's been growing on me. It's quick and it does not forgive you — two hits and you're rewinding the whole encounter — and my instinct going in was to want more of a cover-and-line-up-your-shot structure, something closer to tactical shooting than to whatever this is. But the game clearly doesn't want that from you. The fragility is the design. It keeps shoving you forward into rooms instead of letting you post up at a doorway and pick people off, and once I stopped fighting that and started playing aggressive — moving through instead of around — it clicked in a way cover-based shooting never would've let it.
It's landed, predictably, in a weird spot with people — press comparisons keep reaching for Hotline Miami crossed with Kane & Lynch 2, which tracks on rhythm and setting: same trial-and-error loop, same soaked-in-noir Asian crime backdrop. The camera's not really the same trick, though — Kane & Lynch 2 slapped a broadcast-TV filter over third-person carnage, nobody in the fiction is actually holding that camera. Better Than Dead's is diegetic, it's strapped to the woman doing the shooting, which changes what the shakiness means. I'll admit I'm not a neutral party in this comparison — I loved both Kane & Lynch games, dog days and all, and Hotline Miami is one of those titles I still think about years later, so anything willing to work that same seedy, trial-and-error vein gets goodwill from me before it's even earned it.
Might be worth doing proper pieces on both of those at some point — there's more than enough there to justify it. Steam's got Better Than Dead sitting Mostly Positive, and the split in the reviews is basically the same split I have with myself about it — people either bounce off the sway and the fisheye immediately, or they lean into it and start treating every death as data instead of punishment.
It's incredibly weird how games that I start as a "let's see what this is, i'll probably hate it" are usually the ones that stick with me . Played this because I got tired of waiting for Unrecord (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2381520/Unrecord/) - I still hate the promotional image (the one on top of this post)
I'm still not sure it's what I wanted. I'm fairly sure it's smarter than what I wanted.