Dead Head Fred

After writing the hands-on preview for Dead Head Fred, I was eagerly looking forward to playing the full game. And, except for a few quibbles, I've had even more fun. Once I had time and a bug-free version (the trial version I originally played was the buggy one; the retail version gave me no problems), I found myself absorbed with beating my way through crowds of zombies and other unpleasant folk while trying to find my way around and get my revenge.

The real appeal of Dead Head Fred, for me anyway, was the head-swapping. Instead of collecting items or weapons or any of the other various ways of upgrading a character's abilities, in DHF you get new heads. Some are given to you (and sometimes lost again) at certain points in the game, and some you get by collecting heads from certain enemies.

Each head has its strengths and weakness and can be used for different tasks. The jar head that you start out with, for example, can be upgraded so that Fred heals faster when he's wearing it, but he'll drown in deep water. With the stone head, he's safe underwater and can smash open cracked walls.

By the same token, each head is particularly strong for fighting a particular enemy and weak against other enemies. You can also purchase head upgrades, but they're expensive.

Aside from the head-swapping (and I never got tired of the animation for that, simple as it was, or the fact that each head made Fred move in a completely different way), the gameplay is fairly familiar. Jump, fight, use a special move. Get money by beating up bad guys, helping friendlies, selling items or fishing (yes, fishing). Get health potions by beating up bad guys, buying them, or making them from the worms you catch (or use the worms for fishing). The macabre detail keeps it interesting, though, for the most part.

While the graphics in Dead Head Fred aren't really anything special in the sense of being, say, mind-blowingly realistic, they have a definite appeal. Especially if you like things a little on the ghoulish side. The character design is pretty stylish, though the colors tend to lean towards the slightly muddy (or maybe slimy). Everyone who worked on the art for this title must have a wicked side, and it lends a lot of character to the game.

One might expect the music and voice-acting to complement the gothiness of the art, which would have been okay. Instead, there's an appealing disjuncture, with the characters having a distinct gangster movie sound. Perhaps "disjuncture" is too strong a word, though, as many of the characters do look like they came out of said gangster movie--if it had a head-on collision with a zombie flick.

All of this is really just a long way of saying that the sights and sounds of Dead Head Fred will appeal to some gamers, and turn off others. If you don't like this kind of design, you might want give the game a try anyway, because it really is fun.

There aren't very many perfect games out there, so it's no surprise (and not much of a criticism) to say that DHF isn't perfect, either. That said, I don't really have a whole lot to complain about.

For some things, the controls seemed a little touchier or stickier than they needed to be. This was especially the case with Shrunken Head Fred. I leapt to my death quite a few times on a jump that shouldn't have been hard to make (but how many games have we had that happen in?).

The other small criticism I have is that once you figured out the best way to beat a particular enemy, ever other one of that kind became a sort of mechanical exercise. Throwing a whole crowd of familiar enemies at you at once did help in keeping down the tedium--fighting several at a time could require a different strategy than one on one. At times, though, I felt I was just going through the same series of button presses to get to the next area.

I already said that the biggest appeal in Dead Head Fred is the head-swapping gameplay mechanic. There is one other draw that I think is probably even more important in the long term: the story. The twisted gangster plot kept me going through the parts I found tedious. Like a well-plotted, novel, I wanted to keep going to find out what happened next.

Plus, I have a rather morbid sense of humor, and DHF just really appealed to me. I'll probably play it again, and I'd definitely buy a sequel if one came out.