In the universe where robots took over the world, you are leading a human character named U.H. Wutt who is "too smart" for his kind and thus is sentenced to death. Game's narrative takes place in the future, in a steampunky environment, filled with witty, funny and often sarcastic elements (boards with text in the back of the main screen). These reference older, current and probablz future pop-culture elements, fenomenons and everyone will easily recognise links with reality TV shows.
Death by Game Show is a combination of strategy and tower defense in 2D style, with nice textures and cartoonish animation. In-game music and effects are relly nice, althought get repetitive after some time. There is in-game level editor and much of the game is customizable. Steam workshop is implemented so you can tweak and change things as you like.
Now, let me walk you through my own experience while playing the game. I am not used to playing these kind of games, so naturally Death by Game Show was hard for me to beat (shhhh, I didn't beat it yet but don't tell anyone ;) First level is kind of tutorial, and the next few levels will serve to get used to the gameplay, mechanics and story. I was confused at the begining, because you cannot do much with your charracter. You can stand there and spawn droids to fight for you, walk left or right through the screen to run away from enemy droids, and collect coins and other items with your hook.
The game is hard, even more so if you don't have much experience in these type of games and it can get frustrating repeating the level over and over again (especially if you are stubborn like me and don't want to decrease difficulty through a slider that is presented to you before every level). Also, every level has goals that player needs to beat to progress through the game, like collect X amount of money, or survive for X minutes and combination of those. And it doesn't help that you have to do everything at the same time - spawn droids, dodge attacks from ground and air, spin the wheel to get reward in the game, red the text on the boards in the background, watch on your health bar... AArrrrghh!!!
But, after you succesfully defeat a level, frustration is easily negated with pride, joy and hype. So, after initially you wanted to break your monitor and keyboard because you died or failed 15 times in one level, you finally get praise and feel like a god when you beat it. After every succesfully finished level you get a prize, which can be one-time-use building, or droids, speed up, health etc. Game asks for strategic thinking, placing buildings and spawning droids, but even if you fail the level you get rewarded with coins collected in that level. Levels in the game are repleyable and often require different strategies to finish. As I said, you can set difficulty bar but at highest difficulty the rewards will be the best.
As a downside, Death by Game Show does get repetitive after some time, and if you are note used to this type of line-defense games difficulty of this game can throw you off. There are some bugs, and several parts of gameplay needs to be tweaked, but creators of the game are constantly listening to the players community and making changes. That is a great thing because Death by Game Show is a real gem in the indie game world and in the end I had a lot of fun playing it. I would recommend to everyone to give it a try at least, the feeling is the best whnen you get hyped after finishing the level, previously failing it dozen of times :D
