To be blunt: it’s very poorly implemented, and requires a lot of grinding. The other big thing here (which I sort of touched on with the crowbar upgrades) is crafting.
Luckily, the game controls well enough so that it’s quite easy to do this – even if, like me, your instinct in games is to run headlong into every battle, never dodge, and hack away until you win. Consequently, you need to get very good at dodging, very quickly. The world is, naturally, also filled with zombies, most of which can kill you with two hits. To be fair, that’s leaving out a few things. Repeat that for hours on end, and you’ve got a sense of the basic gameplay loop.
You start off with a weak crowbar, and then you very slowly hack away at small items until you gather enough supplies that you can upgrade the crowbar enough that you can hack away at slightly larger items. It would be silly to allow players to ruin everything right off the bat.īut at the same time, Dysmantle makes it a chore to destroy even the smallest things. Of course, that’s sort of the point: you’re in a post-apocalyptic world, scavenging for supplies and avoiding or killing zombies. The whole point of the game is destroying everything around you so that you can gather supplies, but the destruction is here much more targeted and on a much smaller scale. Sadly, Dysmantle doesn’t offer the same level of destruction. As someone whose favourite game of all time might just be Red Faction: Guerrilla entirely because you can destroy everything, that spoke to me. Normally I’m not one for post-apocalyptic games, but Dysmantle offered something special: the promise that you could destroy (almost) everything in sight. Also on: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox One