Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first hour of NeverDead has an immediate, gleefully stupid energy. Bryce is a demon hunter who can survive being dismantled, so a normal third-person shootout becomes a fight to remain functional. You fire guns, use a sword, dodge, block, and evade through demon hordes, but taking damage has a more physical consequence than simply draining a health bar: limbs fly off, actions become unavailable, and you need to get yourself back together.

That idea genuinely changes how you read danger. An arm lost to an explosion is not necessarily the end of a battle, but it can leave Bryce weakened until you retrieve it or wait for it to grow back. Total decapitation is the tense version of the joke. You control Bryce’s head and roll it toward his torso while granbabies patrol nearby looking to consume it. Being swallowed leads to a quick-time escape, which makes the most vulnerable moments feel more irritating than heroic when the battlefield is already crowded.

There is more thought here than the game’s reputation sometimes suggests. Bryce can deliberately shed parts of himself for small environmental puzzles, set himself on fire to burn enemies, and conduct electricity to stun foes. Experience from collectibles feeds skill upgrades, including improvements that can make limbs explode. These are exactly the kind of systems that reward experimentation, though the game can feel less like controlled chaos and more like an interruption when reassembly repeatedly pulls attention away from shooting.

NeverDead works best if you can laugh at the indignity. It asks you to accept that a demon hunter may spend part of a fight as a rolling head, and then build tactics around that fact. The cooperative and competitive multiplayer challenges extend the combat beyond the campaign, but the core question remains whether this deliberately clumsy vulnerability sounds entertaining to you. If it does, there is nothing quite like it; if it does not, the novelty wears thin fast.

Graphics

You see the action from behind Bryce as he fights through a modern-day demonic invasion, and the clearest visual hook is his body coming apart under attacks and explosions. Limbs scattered across a combat space, followed by Bryce rolling back into position to reclaim them, make the game’s central joke easy to understand at a glance.

Bryce, his partner Arcadia Maximille, demon hordes, and the tiny granbabies give battles a busy supernatural look. The camera view is useful for tracking Bryce’s immediate surroundings, although the chaos of scattered body parts and swarming enemies can make the important problem in front of you harder to sort out.

Story

Bryce’s backstory is knowingly broad: more than 500 years ago, demon king Astaroth murdered his wife, and Bryce was cursed with immortality. In the present day he has become an alcoholic, foul-mouthed private investigator who hunts demons for money. It is a pulp setup, and the game leans into Bryce as a bitter, abrasive antihero rather than asking you to find him especially noble.

The main case sends Bryce and the cold, capable Arcadia to investigate a demonic invasion that nearly destroyed a city. Their partnership gives the story its basic forward motion, while the old wound with Astaroth supplies Bryce’s personal stake. The premise has enough built-in momentum for an action game: ancient hatred, a modern catastrophe, and a hero who literally cannot die.

Still, the story’s strongest contribution is how neatly it justifies the gameplay’s weirdness. Bryce’s curse is not merely lore pasted between missions; it explains why being dismembered is routine and why he can weaponize his own body. That connection is more memorable than the detective framing or the revenge setup, so go in for a trashy supernatural action tale rather than a subtle character drama.

Overall Experience

NeverDead is easy to admire and harder to fully enjoy. The immortality system is a real design swing, not a cosmetic flourish, and it produces situations you will not get from a conventional shooter. When you are switching between guns and sword attacks, trying to manage a demon crowd, and suddenly forced to retrieve your own head, the game has a deranged personality that sticks with you.

Its weakness is that the same system frequently makes you feel penalized in a way that is more awkward than exciting. Losing crucial limbs weakens Bryce, recovering them can become a chore, and the granbaby threat makes full dismemberment particularly stressful. Some gamers will enjoy that scramble as the whole point; others will wish the action would let them maintain momentum.

Give it a chance if you value bold, flawed action games over polished consistency and can tolerate a crude protagonist with a strange sense of humor. The payoff is not mastery so much as witnessing an unusual idea pushed further than most games would dare. For a little release background, the NeverDead history and release overview is useful, but the important thing is simple: this is a 5.7/10 curiosity with enough bizarre invention to be worth remembering, even when it tests your patience.

Retro Replay Score

5.7/10