Thank you Beard Logic for providing us with a review code!

Grave Complex caught my attention as I’ve been seeking out more tower defense games. Although Grave Complex claims it is a post-apocalyptic survival tower defense rogue-lite, it’s more of a survival game with tower defense and rogue-lite elements.

The game begins with the player character only in his underwear, being ordered around by an unnamed scientist. He’ll have you complete various tasks such as building and defending radio towers, killing zombies, or finding documentation. Despite there only being a few musical tracks in the game, every line by the scientist is voiced. Technically the player character is also voiced, but only consists of inner monologues or a representation of a conscience—he never directly speaks to any character. There’s a bit of humor in the voice acting due to the delivery and dialogue so it is amusing overall.

Grave Complex is displayed from a top-down perspective, with the camera either looking straight down like a satellite or at an angle like the Diablo series. The camera work is solid as it can be adjusted at any time. Everything is done by keyboard and mouse. Movement is responsive but combat can feel somewhat sluggish. There’s also a lot of input buffering when attacking so you’ll find yourself accidentally attacking twice when you only meant to strike once.

A variety of weapons are at your disposal such as bows and arrows, pistols, rifles, axes, pickaxes, and buzzsaws. The axes and pickaxes are used for harvesting materials to construct other weapons, armor, or defenses. Outside of some weapons like the buzzsaw, the melee and ranged weapons feel all too similar to use. The only difference in melee weapons is the amount of damage they do to zombies as different types of zombies are weaker to specific weapons. The ranged weapons can feel awkward to use because they all require a charge-up period before they can fire, and operate by a lock-on system displayed by a red circle underneath the enemy.

In tower defense segments where a radio tower has to be defended, the materials collected all over the map can be used to build barbwire, walls, and crossbows. Because these events only begin when you choose, making an elaborate maze for the zombies to traverse is pretty fun. Since the zombies only follow the path that leads to what they want to attack, unless they are forced to break down walls, seeing zombies march to their second deaths is amusing in its own way. Because these parts can be tackled in different ways, they end up being the best part.

The gameplay loop can get rather repetitive because for the 16 semi-randomly selected missions, all it consists of is moving from one objective to another while collecting materials along the way to better your chances for survival. The survival mechanics such as “hunger” (know as wellness) slowly ticks down and when it is empty, health slowly depletes until it reaches zero. Eating food recovers the wellness meter. What leads to the loop feeling so repetitive is because of the similarly-looking areas displayed by the subpar graphics and the worst map I’ve ever seen from a video game in a long time. The map is borderline useless as only areas that you have uncovered are shown on the map, but the map displays landmarks as pixels. Because everything looks so similar, backtracking is a nightmare. There is little need to backtrack anyway since if you simply follow the objective, you’ll come across areas with more materials.

Some rogue-lite elements exist, as when you either die or finish the game, the next playthrough will have you use crystals you accumulated from defeated zombies to upgrade your stats. It isn’t a true rogue-like because exiting the game saves your progress from that point. Some unlocks include increased weapon damage, starting off with certain weapons, materials, or even a jeep. There exists the ability to transform into a Hulk-like zombie. In the beginning, your character is very limited in pretty much every aspect, but as you unlock more things, future playthroughs become more enjoyable—too bad it feels like a slog to get through everything before that moment.

In terms of appropriateness, there are a few things to be mindful of. Every enemy you’ll come across is a zombie, and as stated above, you also can transform into a zombie. In this instance, the zombies are caused by a scientific experiment gone wrong instead of some magical force. Violence is plentiful as axes can sever the limbs off of enemies, but no blood is present. Instead, enemies ooze a blue-like substance. The worst in terms of language consists of “(jack)a*s” and “b*st*rd”.

Many bugs are present. Some are funny and can end up being beneficial while playing. Doing a roll when on the roof of a building can have you clip through the building, which can prove to be useful in many situations. There is also a momentum-based bug that rolling can launch you forward at a high speed. This can also be useful in the beginning when movement is slow at first. Some not-so-fun bugs are ones where your crafting menu is messed up, being unable to craft most goods, your jeep sometimes just disappearing, and some unlocks not showing up when starting a new playthrough. Despite coming across many types of bugs, this game never crashed on me once.

In the end, Grave Complex is not visually appealing, the gameplay loop is boring the majority of the time, and the sounds and music not including the voice acting are mediocre. The brain-dead AI (no pun intended) barely put up a fight until the late game where they swarm you in the dozens. So many random bugs plague the experience, and the rogue-lite elements have little reason to exist. In my 15 hours of playing which consisted of me beating it twice as well as getting 24 out of the 42 achievements, I only enjoyed maybe four hours of it. In terms of morality, it’d be somewhere around the equivalent of a Teen rating. Grave Complex has a lot of issues—and the worst part about that is there is something entertaining beneath all of that. The abilities once unlocked are cool to mess around with in a sandbox-like manner—it just demands too much time and effort for most people to commit to the experience.