Drawn To Death: PS4 Review

Drawn To Death: PS4 Review

Platform: PS4
Part of the PS Plus line up for April

We've all spent time doodling, passing away those endless hours at work or at school employing our creative juices in an all together more fruitful pastime.

This latest, from David Jaffe, takes the pencil-drawn shenanigans to the next level and places it all in an arena shooting match, that's an online 4 player experience.

It begins in what feels like a VR Experience as you find yourself in a classroom, with the teacher droning on in front of you. But glancing down at the doodles on your book and the silly scribbles below, brings the world of the ballpoint pen scrawl to life.

Taking you into the game, you get to play a character that looks like a Sid Vicious punk dragged through a 2000AD prism and sprayed in Viz like sensibilities. Tutored by a frog that fires insults your way, the opening levels give you the basics on how to shoot, spray bile and survive, before you end up in an arena and fighting others.

Drawn to Death's visuals are pretty incredible when you consider that basically, they're just paper drawings brought to life via computer. They manage to stand out from the background, and feel like they have depth even though your mind tells you this can't really be possible.

As you enter the arenas and take on others, the game's juvenile disposability comes to life and the game's cheaper and simpler premise makes the whole thing more playable than it should be. Chasing others around an arena and using an array of weapons to take them out while racing to the top of the leaderboard makes the game's simple MO its one pleasure.

Sure, the childishness comes through, but the game's in keeping with its puerile point of view. From drawing women with melon shaped breasts to general abusiveness, this is a game that feels like it's been torn from the mind of a teenager.

While occasionally some of the matches suffer because of different weapons being better than others, the playability of the game itself helps over-compensate for its own failings. If you're willing to put up with a degree of repetitive gaming and also a fairly shallow experience, then Drawn To Death is for you. If you're looking for more depth in an online shooter, then there's plenty more fodder in the PlayStation Store for you to unload cash upon - but given this one is free as part of PlayStation Plus for April, you can't really complain.