Overdosed - A Trip to Hell Review

It’s been a busy time in Hell recently: from DOOM to SEUM the fiery pits have seen a lot of recent visitors having a good time. Clearly not pleased with all the smiling faces passing through, Overdosed - A Trip to Hell sets out to be as unpleasant as humanly possible and does a pretty good job of it. Overdosed is a twin-stick shooter that attempts to be incredibly edgy with drug references and Deadpool-esque fourth wall breaking, though it fails in that regard.

Drugs in Overdosed are used for one of three reasons: cocaine is a consumable that gives you an additional life, LSD gives you a random effect and there are mystery drugs littered around the level, which, when consumed, begin a minigame where the player needs to press the spacebar when the arrows are in the middle of the bar in the green section. This is basically impossible, because the arrows move way too fast, and don’t stop when the spacebar is pressed, but rather at some time afterwards. Failing this skill check gives you a negative effect, such as summoning a big wave of enemies or slowing down the player, and succeeding the check never gave me anything useful. That meant I avoided what was probably meant to be a main mechanic because it felt awful to use.

The enemies are red insects that bleed and whose bodies do not despawn when killed. After a while, chokepoints around the doors and corridors become incomprehensible blurs of claret, where you cannot tell what is dead and what is still alive. They have an incredibly annoying scuttling noise that can be heard from half the map away, which adds to the cacophony of sound the game presents. The bugs also have a tendency to spawn on top of each other, stopping any movement and amplifying the scuttling noise.

A small bug problem

There are a selection of guns, beginning with dual-wield sub-machine guns that have unlimited ammo, progressing through a shotgun, a flamethrower, a sniper rifle and a chain gun, all of which require ammo pick-ups. All of these guns look and feel awful. The shotgun doesn’t appear to have an actual texture, it’s just the default grey from Unreal Engine. Throughout the level, alongside the mystery drugs and ammo pickups, are upgrade boxes which give you an upgrade point, used to boost the damage and fire rate of one of the weapons in the hub world shop. In this shop, you can buy the aforementioned drugs, the guns and their ammo, a sentry turret - which seems counter intuitive to a game in a genre about exploring - and a kebab, which is a consumable that restores health.

Overdosed does a really bad job of making itself look interesting: the levels are grey and boring and incredibly samey. The camera can be quite awkward, since it seems to prefer having the player to one side of the screen rather than in the centre - this makes it impossible to react to enemies attacking from behind, which they are liable to do because they just spawn from anywhere. Couple this with parts of the walls that the player can get stuck in and you get a really unpleasant gameplay experience.

This game looks and feels like it’s someone’s first game, and I feel a little bad about being so negative towards it, but this game was in Early Access, and a lot of my complaints are in user reviews from months ago. Overdosed feels like it came out of Early Access way too early, and it needs more time to become the good game it has the potential to be.