Death Point

Death Point is a hardcore top-down shooter and stealth game set in a grim post-apocalyptic future. You play as a surviving agent who wakes up in a prison, barely alive, while your operator is trapped elsewhere in enemy territory. With elimination sensors ticking in your heads, you must use cunning, stealth, and a wide arsenal of weapons to eliminate enemies, find the girl, and call for an evacuation. The game features a 10-chapter episodic storyline, tactical combat, and dual-stick controls, challenging players’ reactions and strategic planning in a world that offers no second chances.

Death Point: A Flawed Homage to Stealth’s Golden Age

In the vast annals of video game history, certain titles are destined not as landmarks, but as curious footnotes—games that capture the spirit of a genre’s past glories yet stumble in their execution. Death Point, a 2017 indie stealth-action game from the relatively unknown Andiks Ltd., is one such artifact. It is a game of stark contradictions: ambitious in its mechanical homage yet undermined by technical jank and narrative missteps, a title that promises a hardcore tactical experience but often delivers frustration. This review seeks to excavate its every layer, from its troubled development to its fleeting legacy, to determine its true place in the pantheon of stealth games.

Development History & Context

The Studio and The Vision
Andiks Ltd. entered the scene not as seasoned veterans of the stealth genre, but as developers with a background in mobile titles and a single browser-based MMORPG. Death Point represented a significant, ambitious pivot. Developed in the Unity engine, it was a multi-platform release from the outset, targeting Android and iOS in August 2017, with PC, Mac, and Linux versions following shortly after. This broad release strategy suggested a studio confident in its product, aiming for a wide reach across both mobile and desktop gaming audiences.

The vision, as articulated in the game’s official materials, was clear: to create a “hardcore single player top-down shooter, stealth game” that would “test your reaction and cunning.” The developers explicitly drew inspiration from the titans of the genre—name-dropping Metal Gear Solid, Hitman, and Payday as clear touchstones. Their goal was to synthesize the tense, methodical gameplay of these classics into a top-down perspective with modern dual-stick controls, a concept ripe with potential for both nostalgia and innovation.

The 2017 Gaming Landscape
The year of its release is crucial context. By 2017, the stealth genre had evolved dramatically. The era of pure, punishing stealth exemplified by early Splinter Cell titles had given way to a more hybridized approach, with games like Dishonored and Metal Gear Solid V offering players unprecedented freedom and flexibility. The indie scene, however, had begun to see a resurgence of love for more rigid, challenging experiences. Death Point aimed to tap into this niche—a throwback to a time when stealth was less a suggestion and more a mandatory, brutal discipline. It was a gamble, banking on the appeal of retro-style difficulty in a market increasingly dominated by more accessible, player-friendly designs.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

A Boilerplate Plot with Cringe-Worthy Execution
The narrative setup of Death Point is, on paper, serviceable espionage fodder. After a mission goes catastrophically wrong, only two agents survive: the player-character (a nameless operative) and their partner, a female operator codenamed, simply, “she.” The protagonist awakens in a prison, while she is trapped elsewhere in enemy territory. Complicating matters, both have “Elimination sensors” implanted in their heads, initiating a literal countdown to their deaths. The objective is straightforward: find your partner, call for evacuation, and survive.

Where this simple premise collapses is in its execution, particularly through the dialogue and character dynamic. The operator, communicated with via radio, is portrayed not as a competent fellow spy but as a poorly written caricature. Described in reviews as a “busty blonde in a revealing catsuit,” her dialogue is a relentless barrage of cringe-inducing, sexually charged one-liners, addressing the player as “hon” and “cowboy” with jarring frequency. As the 148Apps review noted, it evolves from “laughably bad at first, but then evolves into an experience that is both annoying and uncomfortable.” The writing strives for a gritty, edgy tone but achieves only adolescent crassness, with swearing and insults (“you’re an asshole”) feeling random and unearned, severely undermining any attempt at narrative tension or emotional investment.

Themes of Survival and Desperation
Beneath the unfortunate dialogue lies a core thematic throughline of desperation and survival against overwhelming odds. The ticking clock of the elimination sensors introduces a constant, low-level anxiety, a mechanic that could have been a compelling driver of pace had it been paired with a more mature narrative. The post-apocalyptic, sci-fi setting suggests themes of a world that “doesn’t forgive mistakes & gives no chance for the weak to survive,” but these ideas are never explored with any depth. The story exists purely as a functional framework to string together its ten episodic chapters, a missed opportunity to elevate the gameplay into something more meaningful.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

A Solid, Sometimes Clever, Stealth Foundation
At its core, Death Point‘s gameplay mechanics demonstrate a genuine understanding of classic stealth tenets. The top-down perspective is well-utilized; line of sight is clearly defined, and environmental objects provide crucial cover. One of the game’s most innovative features is the visual representation of sound: footsteps of unseen enemies are displayed as audible ripples on the ground, allowing players to track patrol patterns through walls—a clever and visually stylish substitute for a traditional “sound meter.”

The toolset is respectably varied. Players can perform silent melee takedowns, hide bodies, and utilize a range of gadgets:
* Throwables: Bottles and other objects to distract guards.
* Tactical Gear: Smoke bombs for concealment and flashbang grenades for disorientation.
* Scanning Mode: A battery-limited ability that drains an energy meter to highlight enemies and objectives through walls, praised for its cool visual effect.

The arsenal includes silenced pistols, shotguns, UZIs, and landmines, offering a shift from pure stealth to loud-but-brute force if desired, though the game heavily punishes the latter approach.

Flawed Execution and Aggravating Design Choices
For every step forward, Death Point takes another back due to flawed execution:
* Unintelligent AI: Enemy behavior is notoriously simplistic. Guards possess a narrow cone of vision and can be easily exploited. As noted in hands-on reports, they often fail to react to blatant stimuli, such as a gunshot or the takedown of a comrade mere feet away, breaking immersion and reducing the challenge to a game of managing simplistic routines rather than outsmarting credible opponents.
* Checkpoint, Not Save: The game employs a checkpoint system instead of allowing manual saves. This, combined with its trial-and-error nature, means failing later in a level forces a complete restart of lengthy sections, a design philosophy that feels dated and unnecessarily punitive.
* Technical Jank & Control Issues: At launch, the game was plagued with problems. The Linux version, for instance, lacked basic video options, causing it to launch on the wrong monitor with no in-game way to change it. Full gamepad support, a baffling omission for a 2017 release, had to be patched in later after player complaints. Achievements were reportedly bugged, displaying progress for objectives not yet attempted.
* Narrative Interference: The poorly written dialogue cannot be skipped and repeats upon every death, turning the trial-and-error process into an exercise in auditory annoyance. Thankfully, an option to mute dialogue was eventually added.

World-Building, Art & Sound

Functional, Gritty Aesthetics
Death Point’s visual direction is best described as functional. The HD top-down graphics are clean and readable, which is essential for a tactical game. The art style leans into a gritty, industrial sci-fi aesthetic—prisons, factories, subway tunnels—but lacks a distinct visual identity. It effectively conveys a sense of oppressive, enemy-held territory but does so with generic textures and environments that fail to be memorable.

The character portrait of the operator, however, became a focal point of criticism. Its overly sexualized design felt drastically out of place with the tone the game seemed to be aiming for, contributing to the narrative’s lack of seriousness.

Competent but Unremarkable Sound Design
Sound design serves its purpose. Weapon reports have weight, and the ambient noise of industrial settings helps build atmosphere. The voice acting, however, is a significant detriment. The performances range from bland to outright bad, with inconsistent audio mixing that sometimes renders dialogue inaudibly quiet before abruptly cutting off for the next story beat. The music is a background element, setting a mood but not leaving a lasting impression.

Reception & Legacy

A Muted Critical and Commercial Response
Death Point launched to little fanfare and mixed-to-negative reception. The lone recorded critic review from 148Apps scored it a 60/100, summarizing it as a game with competent stealth mechanics buried under “a bevy of caveats.” User reviews were sparse; the game failed to garner significant attention on platforms like Steam or Metacritic, where it lacks a metascore due to insufficient reviews.

On discussion forums, the conversation was dominated not by praise for its gameplay, but by players seeking technical support for its myriad issues—bug fixes, requests for key rebinding, and questions about gamepad support. It was a game that spent its early life addressing problems that should have been resolved before launch.

A Fading Footnote
The legacy of Death Point is virtually non-existent. It did not inspire a wave of similar top-down stealth games, nor is it remembered as a hidden gem. Andiks Ltd. did not build upon its foundation; they moved on to other projects, leaving Death Point as an isolated, flawed experiment. Its primary historical value is as a case study in the challenges indie developers face when attempting to emulate AAA genres: ambition can be undermined by a lack of polish, poor narrative execution, and technical incompleteness. It serves as a reminder that nailing the core mechanics is only half the battle; the entire package must be cohesive.

Conclusion

Death Point is a fascinating artifact of unfulfilled potential. It is not a bad game in its entirety; its core stealth loop, particularly the sound-based visibility system, shows flashes of clever design that could have formed the basis of a compelling indie title. However, it is irrevocably hamstrung by a perfect storm of negative factors: cringe-inducing narrative and dialogue, simplistic and often broken AI, punitive save systems, and a litany of technical issues at launch.

For the most dedicated stealth aficionados curious about a budget-tier, top-down take on the genre, it might offer a few hours of passing entertainment, preferably on a deep discount and with the dialogue muted. But for the broader audience, it stands as a flawed homage, a game that understood the mechanics of its inspirations but completely missed the soul. In the grand tapestry of video game history, Death Point is not a landmark but a cautionary tale—a well-intentioned effort that ultimately collapsed under the weight of its own inadequacies. Its point of death, it seems, was its own conception.