To be honest, I was insomnia and browsing the mobile app store in the middle of the night last night. I accidentally saw this game called "Deadly Company". I clicked on it and played it for an hour. It actually made me, a 30-year-old guy, regain a little of the impulse I had in the Symbian era. I'm not going to brag about it, but today's games are either ridiculously expensive or require repetitive tasks to complete daily tasks. It's really rare for me to calm down and play for more than ten minutes. But this free game is really interesting.
When I used Nokia N73 to play "Seven Nights" and "Hell's Requiem", I felt the nervousness of groping forward in a dim scene and being suddenly startled by a monster. Now I still feel sweaty when I think about it. At that time, the game capacity was only a few dozen megabytes, but the level design, monster AI, and atmosphere creation were not ambiguous at all. Later mobile games became bigger and bigger, and the graphics became more and more exquisite, but the immersive feeling of "startling every step of the way" became less and less.
Deadly Company reminds me of those old guys. It has no fancy card drawing, no automatic path finding, just hard-core exploration and combat. Players have to complete tasks in a closed environment full of mutated creatures and weird monsters, and each monster has a unique shape and attack mode - some like to collide head-on, some will sneak attack from behind, and some can even disguise themselves as scene objects. You must carefully observe their patterns of action, choose different weapons and tactics to deal with them, and cannot act recklessly. This kind of strategy reminds me of the days when I played "Monster Hunter" P2G and studied the weaknesses of each dragon. Although the platforms and types are different, the pleasure of using my brain is the same.
What makes me even more impressed is that the developer Hainan Star Jump Technology actually made this game free, and it can run smoothly on the Android 5.0 system. To put it bluntly, many major manufacturers require you to install a few hundred megabytes of installation package and start with 4G of memory to make a skin-changing card game, but in the end, it is still a one-stop battle automatically. Looking back at "Fatal Company", although the graphics are not top-notch, the optimization is solid, the UI is simple, and the operation feedback is sensitive. It is obviously something made by people who really understand the game.
Of course, there are also shortcomings. For example, the guidance for newbies is relatively weak, and they may be a little confused when they first enter, not knowing where to go first. The monster difficulty gradient jumps a bit. Sometimes the first room is calm, but the group is wiped out at the second corner. But then again, how could there be any nanny-level tutorials for those classic games back then? Aren't they all gained from experience after dying dozens of times? This primitive learning curve makes it even more addictive.
If you are an old player like me who came from the Symbian era, or are tired of the same old "999 for one dollar" game, you might as well give "Deadly Company" a try. It's not perfect, but it's pure. Maybe you will curse after playing for two hours, but if you persist until the third hour, that long-lost feeling of being firmly pulled by the charm of the game itself may remind you of the nights you secretly played video games while hiding in bed ten years ago. 😌