Deadlink is a well-polished, extensive FPS/roguelike experience that I can see being an absolute time-sink for many players.

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Sometimes a game doesn’t need an engrossing story or compelling main characters. Sometimes, you just want to go from virtual arena to virtual arena and take out enemies with an assortment of weapons, tools and abilities. This is what Deadlink offers. It is a roguelike first-person shooter set in a cyberpunk world where corporations are more powerful than governments, and have the violent means to hold onto that power. You are a brain in a jar that can be transferred to different combat shells, using their skills in a VR setting to test their capabilities against those corpo assets.

From the off, you can see Deadlink has a lot of depth to it. You’ll be repeating runs to earn experience and points, allowing you to unlock new skills and abilities while making progress across levels to unlock the other three ‘shells’ to shove your brain into. The default Soldier shell is not all it’s cracked up to be, and while it suits the first area it is the least fun to use. It comes equipped with a shotgun and rocket launcher, while the abilities include a rappel that can hook onto surfaces and enemies, and a Scrambler that marks and staggers foes. The Hunter shell is more entertaining to use, coming equipped with a Hand Cannon and Arc Cannon, as well as the translocator ability, which swaps your position with a normal enemy as well as marking and stunning them. The next shell is the Decoy which leaves behind a hologram that enemies target while you stay invisible for a bit, but it’s far from being the most fun to use.

That title goes to the Engineer, which comes equipped with a Gauss automatic rifle and a grenade launcher. The Engineer’s deeply enjoyable abilities include being able to deploy a turret, and use a wormlink that can link to enemies marking and incapacitating them. Finally, there’s the Juggernaut, armed with a sawed-off shotgun and a flak cannon, with a Graviton Punch ability which can destroy some enemies in one hit, and Stray Redirector which makes the shell invulnerable for a bit, but sacrifices movement speed. While I did experiment with all the shells, it was Engineer I kept going back to, though Hunter, Juggernaut, and Soldier all offered something different to enjoy.

The combat shells are just one small part of what Deadlink offers. Once you’ve selected your shell, you’ll eventually have three modes open up. The Campaign challenges you to move through four stages, each made up of rooms and with a boss waiting at the end. Time Attack offers courses that will test your reactions, and there’s the Extant Existence mode which is an unlimited wave mode, where you try to survive against enemies for as long as possible. Unlike many Roguelikes, the rooms themselves are set so you can learn enemy spawn patterns, but the challenge will always be different due to your implants. Implants and room transitions is where the Roguelike elements of Deadlink come in.

Deadlink’s implant system is the anchor of the Roguelike, making  you consider their strategies on every run. As you progress through each arena you may get the chance to equip an implant, or make adjustments to weapons and the shell. These can be anything from adding fire or toxic damage to your gun, making your abilities more powerful, or improving the amount of health and shield you have. You won’t know what implant will be offered so you really are coming up with your approach on the fly. The implants themselves have different tiers, and need different amounts of power, which you can see in the equip screen. Legendary implants require the most power as they offer the best advantages, for example, providing a combat drone to assist.

The power management is easy to figure out, as rows on menu show how much battery power is needed for a slot to be used. Furthermore, implants are split into active and passive. Active implants demand action being taken by you, like activating an ability, or breaking the C-balls that are floating around the arena, while passive implants are always on in the background. There are dozens of implants to find and unlock, with more being made available as you level up. I have to say, my best run came from having a majority of passive implants, as then I could just focus more on running and gunning.

The levelling up system has its own depth with upgrades available for individual shells, as well as general upgrades that improve health, shields, unlock new tiers of weapon mods, upgrades, and more permanent buffs or abilities, such as the defibrillator which will revive you once on a run. Some upgrades require experience points to unlock, while others require Turing Tokens, with the better ones requiring both. Experience is earned through playing the levels, while Turing Tokens can be found as one of the offers at the end of an arena, or through defeating bosses.

All of these in-depth systems of implants and levelling feed into the main experience. Deadlink only has four overall stages, split into combat arenas, but with the challenge you will not get past the first two, Tora and Watts, without significant experience and upgrades. The action is very fast paced, and you are almost always moving to avoid incoming attacks while firing off your own, but it does start to feel a bit repetitive as you go through the same levels trying to move further. There are no surprises waiting for you in the initial runs most of the time, though occasionally you will need to survive for 45 seconds, which isn’t a huge challenge, or break corrupt C-Balls. To unlock the higher difficulties you also need to complete runs on the lower difficulty, which does give something to aim for but also risks you burning out.