Here are a few of the phrases uttered by yours truly during my playthrough of NeverDead:

“Wow, this game is rubbish.”

“I’d rather be reviewing Duke Nukem Forever.”

“Please sever my fingers with a rusty grapefruit spoon so I don’t have to carry on.”

Yes – NeverDead, the latest third-person action game from Rebellion Studios, is actually that awful.

The problem? Its supposed draw card is its biggest downfall: your character, an immortal demon hunter named Bryce, is able to have his limbs dismembered and reattached as he combats a host of otherworldly nasties. However, instead of being anywhere near as cool as it sounds, you end up feeling less like an unstoppable killing machine and more like some sort of turbo-leper.

In fact, that would’ve been a way better title. Let’s call it that from now on as we dismember this abysmal mess piece by piece, shall we?

The story in TurboLeper comes in dribs and drabs, with the first portion of the game dropping you straight into the action with a pithy back-story amounting to a single message: “You are immortal.”

Yes, well… uh, thanks Rebellion Studios. I think I picked that much up from the title. The rest of the writing in the game is equally bad and riddled with obvious puns, most notably cringe-worthy one-liners like, “Get your head in the game” whenever a demon lops off your head.

Gameplay is just as half-baked. Essentially, as made famous by the Devil May Cry series, you’ll venture into a section of a level, a bunch of creatures who’d like to eat you will spawn, and you have to dispose of them before a barrier disappears and you move onto the next near-identical area.

While attempting to do this, Bryce frequently (and I mean frequently) gets ripped into little pieces by the astonishing variety of foes (and by “astonishing variety” I mean “three”) and has to put himself back together before continuing the fight.

Sounds cool, yes?

No. It’s not.

Instead of allowing you to mix a careful blend of dodging, different weapon attacks and strategies, TurboLeper constantly explodes you into pieces and forces you to pull yourself together before continuing.

Feel like using your guns to blast that spawn pod over there? Oh wait, you can’t, because your arm is flopping around on the floor with all the finesse of an animated piece of boerewors. How about slicing those demons-whose-only-weakness-is-your-sword with, well, your sword? Ooh, no can do; your sword arm is laying across the room learning its new place in the world as a demon hors d’oeuvres.

It gets even better when you get hit so hard that you’re left with nothing but a rolling head; cue bad puns. The only way to progress is to roll on over and reattach yourself to your body, assuming you don’t get swallowed by a baddie or get occasionally stuck (and by “occasionally” I mean “all the damn time”) in the unnecessary amount of debris from the destructible environment littering every combat area.

TurboLeper also manages to further alienate you through excessively lengthy and overly difficult boss battles, shamefully repetitive combat zones, and my personal favourite; a seemingly cool sword-swinging mechanic mapped to the right thumbstick – the same thumbstick that you need to control the camera.

Just when you think you’ve managed to contain your almost-irrepressible urges to smash your controller repeatedly into your own face, TurboLeper further insults you with a good dose of eyebrow-raising sexism. Bryce’s partner, a curvy human sidekick named Arcadia who accompanies you on your quest, spends more time with her bum and boobs shoved up against the camera than her face.

Now, I like an ample-polygoned sidekick as much as the next guy, but when you’re reduced to playing a scene in said sidekick’s apartment where you can raid her underwear drawer, you end up feeling not like a debonair bloke who’s taking a quick peek at a lady’s bloomers, but a creepy pervert who’s just bought a pair of pre-heated schoolgirl panties from a Japanese vending machine with which to romance his privates.

But wait, there’s more! (And by more, I mean less!)

If every aforementioned aspect of TurboLeper isn’t enough to dissuade you, the music most certainly will. As a fan of music that makes me want to swing my head around and push smaller guys inside big, sweaty circles, I was disappointed to hear boy-band nu-metal whining away in the background as I played. Imagine my surprise during my pre-review research to learn that the game’s music had all been done by Fred Durst.

No, just kidding. It was all done by Megadeth.

Yes, the gods of thrash have been reduced to crappy tween-metal, and it blares unashamedly throughout the entire game. Listening to the title track on YouTube on its own, it doesn’t seem particularly bad, but amidst the abomination that is the rest of the game it comes across as yet another annoyingly unpleasant element in a title that’s made up of nothing but.

I like to end my reviews with a simple recommendation, based on my personal opinion as a gamer, as to whether or not you should buy a game. My conclusion for NeverDead?

No. No. A thousand times no.

While I applaud the developers for having the balls to at least try something new in the third-person action genre, I just as quickly yank that applause away after seeing just how horribly implemented it is.

NeverDead is not even worth borrowing from a mate for an afternoon: as soon as the initial reaction of, “Cool, I can rip my own head off!” wears off after the first half-hour you’ll wish you’d rather decided to book yourself in for an unnecessary lumbar puncture instead.

So please, fellow gamers: don’t encourage this kind of sloppy game development by buying NeverDead. It’s only going to waste your money and patience, and despite having an interesting premise and the intent to do something fresh it will lose its appeal almost instantly, quickly drive you up the nearest wall, and ending up simply falling to pieces.

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