Curse of the Deadwood
Curse of the Deadwood is a unique evolution of the twin-stick genre that will have you taking control of two unlikely friends as they fight their way through hordes of wooden zombies. Balance a varied arsenal of long-ranged weapons with devastating melee and magic attacks. Only by working together will you be able to save the Woodlings' beautiful world of Knottington from the Curse of the Deadwood.
UNIQUE ENEMIES
Battle an ever-evolving horde of unique enemies, including the charging Knots, the explosive Thorns, the long-ranged Splinters, and many more! Each Deadwood type has its own strengths and weaknesses that will require you to discover which weapons and attacks are most effective. Take on heart-thumping boss fights that will challenge you to push your strategies to the next level.
ARSENAL OF WEAPONS
Wield a variety of unique weapons including the Saw Mauler, Twig Snapper, Amber Blammer, and more. Unleash on the Deadwood as you upgrade your arsenal with parts you find scattered around the world of Knottington. Customize your weapons by adding new and powerful abilities that will help to see you triumph against the Deadwood.
PLAY STYLE
As you play through Curse of the Deadwood, a variety of ranged weapons and melee attacks become available to you. Every ranged weapon comes with a customizable skill tree for you to unlock and explore. Try out different combinations and find what works best for your play style in each combat scenario.
EXPLORATION
Explore the beautiful world of Knottington as you rescue its quirky and diverse citizens from the roaming Deadwood. Solve puzzles in lush forests, discover weapon upgrades in vast mountain ranges, and unravel mysteries in spooky swamps. There is always something interesting waiting around the next bend.
STORY DRIVEN
Fully voiced cinematics tell the story of an ancient spell broken, a wicked menace reawakened, and a young Woodling named Lathe who vows to do whatever he must to save his beloved home. But he doesn’t have to do it alone! A mysterious stone giant named Roguard will aid Lathe on his quest. As they take on the darkness together, they learn that, through friendship, anything is possible.
Game Discussion
Steam User 44
I fall in the middle. I'm also a game developer for a large AAA studio, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
I don't consider the performance abysmal; however, I also don't consider it stellar. I found that using exclusive full-screen with v-sync on kept me between 70-90 FPS on Ultra with a 3080, i9 9900k, and 64 GB of ram. If you get truly abysmal performance, you'd need to lower the quality setting, or update your graphics drivers, for sure. From a development standpoint, I see no reason a game like this couldn't push at least 165 FPS with the right hardware. This is all to say that I think the performance could use a hefty optimization pass.
As for controls, I would much prefer to see an option for mouse driven movement, similar to other ARPG style games. Allowing for that and rebinding of controls could accomplish this quite easily. It's not that WSAD is necessarily bad, but for ease of access to the player base, it would be a nice gesture.
All in all, worth the $25. I enjoy the art style and the style of gameplay. I’ll be interested to see how the game develops and what the developers do with the feedback they receive.
Side note worth mentioning: 50GB install for a game like this seems MASSIVE. I’m assuming it might be due to the voice acting, but I’m genuinely curious where the file sizes being this large comes from.
Steam User 12
I absolutely love this game. It is beautiful. The twin stick controls are great. The story is worth your time to listen to. Overall it is a refreshing experience.
Now for the issues. What people are calling out about performance is sadly true. There has been one patch already that has addressed some of the real bad lag, but yes there are still issues. When you have too many enemies on the screen, the grass waving, and you are destroying deadwood the game can come to almost a halt.
I have the utmost faith the developers will fix the performance issues and when they do this game will be amazing. Just remember this is a small team taking on a huge project and when you leave a bad review this destroys smaller companies from making great things and allows for more garbage to be put out by money hungry companies.
Steam User 17
A short time in, but so far really enjoying the game. Controls are snappy enough, absolutely beautiful, vibrant world (lovely movement of flora and small critters buzzing around and such).
Enemy placement and durability opposed by player damage output seems pretty good. you can get swarmed, but in the early game it's no big deal to deal with. You do take sufficient damage that you need to be careful(-sh). I play on the default difficulty (Medium in this game). I do like games that scale the difficulty intelligently, so that remains to be seen.
I have the setting on Ultra and everything is buttery-smooth on my three year old Lenovo Legion laptop and Samsung 5120 x 1440 Ultrawide curved monitor.
Simple machine stats if anyone cares:
Intel [email protected]
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 w/Max-Q
32GB system RAM
Yeah, I'm only a short ways in, but this is my opinion so far. I will update if necessary as I progress.
Steam User 6
I hope this review helps those on the fence. The mixed reviews colored my perception for the game, so I kept finding myself surprised at how good it was and I wanted to share that sentiment.
Is it worth buying? Yes.
This game is simply fun, and doesn't take itself too seriously or make it complicated. You won't find yourself doing boring tasks to get to the good parts. The story definitely gets points in my book for originality, and it's fun to discover the lore and storyline as you go.
I really enjoy the exploration aspect of the game. The art and animation is drop-dead gorgeous, which makes it fun to explore. They nailed the level design, because I always feel like I'm going to get hopelessly lost if I stray off the path (I get lost easily in video games), but instead I always stumble upon hidden areas and extra skill points. All I wanted was a game where I could de-stress by annihilating enemies, but it really is much more than that.
As an additional bonus: the voice acting is amazing, cutscenes are great, skill tree is good, the characters and dialogue are fun, and you keep finding new weapons and attacks to keep things interesting. I cannot overstate the quality of the art. You can tell they had fun developing it, and I sure enjoy playing it.
Multiplayer where I have the keyboard and my friend has the mouse? Sold.
Plus, the nostalgia of doing that years ago. Or was I the only one who turned single player games into multiplayer by saying "you drive, I shoot?" Ha! It works better in this game because it's made for it.
Steam User 55
I knew it would be great.
Steam User 6
Not that far into the game but really enjoying it. Excited to try the co-op mode and get farther into the skill tree. The controls are unique, never played a twin stick shooter.
The art style and graphics are great. The recent patch really helped the performance. Runs smoothly now on my setup. Overall fun game I would recommend.
Steam User 3
Really pretty game and overall I enjoyed it. It's a pretty hard game and I'm more of a casual gamer, but even playing on hard mode was a fun challenge rather than rage quit worthy.