Preview – Die After Sunset [Beta] PC

The first thing you’ll notice about Die After Sunset is the familiar bright colours and general overall design, it’s very ‘Fortnite’. Fortunately it doesn’t play anything like that. Instead, it’s more like Risk of Rain 2; a third-person roguelite shooter all about surviving from area to area, powering up as much as you can, and taking down stage bosses. The goal is simple – keep going until you reach the end, but that requires keeping pace with the game itself. You see, as you’re running around fighting enemies for currency and trying to upgrade your equipment, abilities, and traits, the game is also getting tougher by spawning stronger enemies and more of them. It’s a race to stay ahead and stay alive. Unlike Risk of Rain 2, however, the difficulty isn’t forever increasing; instead working on a per-level basis, there’s no levelling mechanic forcing you to keep fighting, and permanent progress is constantly being made after each death via direct base stat upgrades to health, shield, damage output, and ‘light’ (which is used as both run-based currency and a resource for activating special items).

I think it’s safe to say that these differences make this title way more of a casual entry point, which is actually kind of a big relief as RoR2 has kicked my ass up and down for over a year. I know I wouldn’t mind something a bit lighter to jam on every now and then, and Die After Sunset might just be the game to fill that gap. Unfortunately the beta preview only allowed me to get up to the end of the second area, so I couldn’t get a good feel for how the difficulty spikes later stages will presumably present are going to work out, but that didn’t stop me from having a good time both completing the beta normally and then working on some tricky secondary achievements to unlock alternate character abilities and so on.

One thing I’d be remiss to gloss over is the weird dark/light gimmick. The main problem being that it doesn’t seem to be fully ‘there’ yet, or have much of a purpose outside of making the starting grenade (that lights up the area) good. Basically, enemies transform into stronger versions when in shadow. This makes sense when travelling through a dark cave for the potential treasure trove of goodies within; it ups the ante and might force the player to think twice about entering, but it also triggers when the normally cute baddies walk past a tree or other minute obstacle for a second, changing into their darker selves and instantly right back. The whole system falls into an odd middle-ground where it doesn’t seem super necessary to take advantage of, nor is it so detrimental that it’s better to kite the enemies into open areas. It just is. I hope to see it taken more seriously as the game progresses or it could become quite forgettable, (I only just remembered myself by skimming through the Steam page before posting this preview).

In all I’d say there’s a lot of potential here. I’ve already mentioned that I like the relaxed difficulty, as I’m sure many newcomers will, but I also found the addition of randomly occurring challenges that spawn around the map incredibly engaging, even if there isn’t much variety currently. There’s always somewhere to explore or a mission to complete before the boss appears so there’s no downtime, unless you’re trying to unlock some of the more awkward achievements. What I hope to see as development continues is the other characters having totally unique gameplay styles, more missions, an alluring difficulty curve – I’d hate for it to be a total cakewalk after all, and a wider array of enemies, weapons, and unlocks. In short, I want more of everything and I believe Die After Sunset can deliver on all fronts. Entering into early access is going to do wonders for this one and, who knows, we might even see the inclusion of co-op multiplayer. Fingers crossed!