I wrote this review back in 2014, but never published it because I didn’t do the images or video review. Please enjoy this historical artifact, released publicly for the first time in September 2024!

Take one part Diablo, one part poop jokes, and throw in a dash of British-sounding orphans. You’ll end up with DeathSpank. It’s an action-RPG (the “click-stuff-until-it-dies” genre) without the convoluted fantasy plot that’s usually attached.

Hero of the Downtrodden #

DeathSpank is a famous hero (at least, he thinks he is). He announces this to the world at every chance he gets. He’s on a quest to find “The Artifact.” It’s so important that is all it’s called. It also looks like a piece of bacon. Maybe it even is a piece of bacon! You’re going to face some opposition though. Lord von Prong wants to capture you, though he doesn’t seem to be interested in the artifact. He’s a little more interested in a certain undergarment you’re wearing.

As you can probably tell from the plot description above, this is not a game to be taken seriously. Humor is weaved through every part of the game to various effect. Sometimes the humor is very low brow (like the time you have to literally beat the crap out of demons), and other times it gets very smart (pretty much any time it breaks the fourth wall).

The humor makes sense, as one of the co-creators of DeathSpank is the legendary Ron Gilbert, who is probably most famous for Monkey Island and other classic Lucasarts adventure games. His games thrive on a strong sense of humor and clever reversals of your expectations. This is a well-written game. Maybe more important than that though, is this: the story just stays out of your way. It isn’t really that important; it just gives you a reason to go from point A to point B.

Click, Kill, Loot, Repeat #

There’s a standard formula to action-RPGs. You click on things until they die. Then you take the stuff that explodes out of them. Then you do it again. DeathSpank is no exception. They take this formula and… don’t really build on it. It’s a pretty standard action-RPG. It might even be considered a simple one. They keep stats to a minimum: your weapons largely do a certain amount of damage per hit, sometimes with additional elemental damage. Your armor just adds to your health, sometimes with additional elemental resistance. It’s simple, but welcoming. It makes inventory management fairly easy, since it’s very quick to compare the strength of your equipment against each other.

Some people would say that this makes the game too easy. I wouldn’t disagree with them. The game isn’t particularly difficult except for in a few select parts. If you die a lot (like I did), it’s probably just due to poor use of healing items. They even have a button in the inventory you can turn on that will automatically equip your best armor as soon as you pick it up. I turned this on and liked it: it reduced the amount of time I had to spend in inventory management and it worked well, except for a few times I had to override it when facing off against a lot of specific elemental enemies.

A Communications Breakdown #

The hero of the game seems to often assume that people know who he is. After all, he’s a famous hero! This largely isn’t the case, though people are grateful to have a hero come through all the same. This parallels the game pretty well. They do a pretty good job in the start of the game communicating where you should go, and what you should do. About halfway through, this communication starts to break down. The game starts making a lot of assumptions. By now, you should know that the nature element defeats undead creatures. That’s elements 101, right? It’s not just limited to that; they start not offering you direction on where to go.

It’s a double-edged sword: it’s nice to not be hand-held, but it also makes it hard to know if you’re heading into an eventual death trap. Maybe this is intended: if you don’t do side quests (“unimportant stuff I need to do” in the quest log), you won’t be strong enough to do the main story quests (“important stuff I need to do” in the quest log). Maybe they want to keep you off the beaten path to do those things and see all the cool stuff they made. Either way, I sure would appreciate a quest marker on the map screen.

Conclusion and Scores #

An Invitation to Click #

DeathSpank is a simplistic, but clever, action-RPG. It might be enough for some of the genre’s hardcore fans (that’s why Torchlight II exists), but for people with limited or no action-RPG experience, this is a game that welcomes you. The simplified, if poorly communicated, mechanics make it easy to jump in and start killing stuff. And even though it’s hard to know where the game wants you to go, the strong writing should make you want to explore every corner of the map anyway. It’s a competent, if unremarkable, clickfest.

FINAL SCORE: 70% #