Let it Die Hands on Preview - Fighting Your Way Up The Tower One Death At A Time

Written by Brandon Hofer on November 22, 2016

News: We were able to get our hands on a recent build of Let it Die from Gungho and came away impressed with its potential.

Gungho recently invited us to take an early look at their upcoming PS4 title, Let it Die. Let it Die is an action game with a survival twist. When I started my play session I was asked to choose between a male or female character and then once I did that I begun my adventure in nothing but my underwear. The setting is a post apocalyptic world where you will struggle to survive. As you fight enemies they will drop weapons that you will want to pick up and use yourself if you want survive.

As you go through the game you will be fighting your way up this massive tower, called the Tower of Barbs. You will find various weapons and armor to equip to give you a better chance at survival. You will also come across some mushrooms that you can eat that you revive some of your health but you must be careful here. Some mushrooms are poisonous so instead of giving you some more HP they might kill you altogether. Let it Die handles death in an interesting way. If your character dies then your “death data” is sent out among other player’s games where they will appear as opponents. The sharing of this data is one of the asynchronous methods of multiplayer in Let it Die. Your dead fighter will also now appear in your game as an enemy. If you die in the game your character will be resurrected and will now try and take you out. Once you have your new fighter if you defeat your previous fighter (now called a “Hater”) then that fighter will be retrieved and stored in the Fighter Freezer where you can have access to them. You will die a lot in this game and when you do you will come across Kiwako Seto who will offer you an insurance policy from the insurance company she works for, Direct Hell. This is what brings you back from the dead so you can expect to see her quite a bit as you make your way up the tower.

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The combat in Let it Die is of the hack and slash variety. Combat is up close and personal and can be pretty violent, along with the rest of the game. Violence and aggression are rewarded here and if you hesitate then you might live to regret it or your character might not live at all. The more aggressive you are against enemies the more “rage” you will build up. As soon as you get the required amount you can unleash a devastating attack that will lay the smackdown on your opponent and make them think twice about going after you. The combat system appears to be one of those instances where it is really easy to pick up and play but it is going to be pretty hard to really master it. There is a lot of trial and error as you experiment with what works best for you.

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As you make your way up the Tower of Barbs you will find new areas. You will eventually get to your “waiting room” which essentially acts like your hub for the game. This is where you can buy items for your adventure, have someone research better weapons for you, access your fighter freezer, start up the Tokyo Death Metro (the PVP mode in the game) and more. As you get higher in the tower you will come across elevators every so often that will take you back down to the waiting room. You will want to do this to drop off any items that you have collected that might be useful for research or to just level up your character once you have the required amount of experience. It also needs to be noted that the Waiting Room should be the only place where you quit the game. If you are in the waiting room and you need to quit the game then you are fine. If you quit the game outside of the waiting room however it will be treated as a death, so you want to be careful about that. With the suspend feature of the PS4 this probably won’t be too much of a problem, unless you have automatic updates turned on and your system gets turned on and off every so often as it installs as new PS4 firmware update.

During my playtime with Let it Die I enjoyed myself. The game seems to have a great sense of humor which is immediately evident at the beginning when you meet Uncle Death. Uncle Death likes to hang out at arcades and loves to skateboard. He helps be your personal guide on your violent journey and will cheer you on at times. At the beginning he also gives you a reference book that you will use in the game as well as provide color commentary on some of your more brutal kills.

I briefly mentioned the PvP mode up above called “Tokyo Death Metro.” I didn’t get a chance to try it out for myself unfortunately but it sounds very promising. From what I gathered you can sign up for a team and start raiding enemy Waiting Rooms. During these raids you can steal resources and gain points for your team by defeating enemy fighters. If a fighter you have defeated gets knocked unconscious then you can capture them and bring them back to your base. While you have a captured enemy he will generate SPLithium over time. They will also become inaccessible to the original user unless they pay a set fee or rescue them in a raid. The flip side of that coin is that you need to be able to defend your own base. This is where the fighters you have in your freezer will come in handy. You will want to make sure they are as powerful as possible and perhaps use them on a few raids to build up their experience. When enemies raid your waiting room they will have to deal with the fighters you have set up so you want to try and make sure they can get the job done.

Going through my play session of Let it Die I really only had one complaint. There didn’t appear to be anyway to tell where you have previously been. With that being the case it was super easy to get lost in the tower and there were a few times where I did get lost and was running around trying to find a new area. Perhaps it was just the build I was playing and they will have something in the final version but that one part got to be pretty annoying for me.

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Other than that Let it Die looks like it has a lot of promise. The people at Gungho were fantastic and made sure we had everything we needed. I tried to get a release date out of them but all I got was “soon.” They did say it should come out in 2016 though so with it being almost December you should get a chance to try it out for yourself in the near future.