Let it Die, the wacky third person action game by Suda 51’s Grasshopper Manufacture (later Supertrick Games) and published by GungHo, is having its servers shut down. After roughly seven years out in the world, those who’ve had a blast invading each other’s bases will soon be locked out from nabbing loot. But it’s not a death for the game. In fact, with an offline version on the way, it may be something of a rebirth for a genuine underdog.
For those who haven’t played it, Let it Die is by no means the perfect game. It is, I think it’s fair to say, riddled with microtransactions. It is a tad clunky. And what humour it has requires a particular nature that very well may have pushed many away over the years. But the reason it has survived for so long with its own dedicated audience is because there’s a lot of soul to Let it Die. Intended as a style blend between Grasshopper and Gungho, it’s an absurdist roguelite with a taste for violent delights.
Let it Die has a traditional strucure – you proceed through a number of levels before taking on a big boss, collecting loot, completing quests, and gathering fancy blueprints as you go. What’s distinct is the presentation this structure has: you build up a repertoire of bodies – literal bodies – and climb the gnarly Tower of Barbs. The game today is the same time vampire it was all those years ago, but the online features did add something to the mix. Upon death in the tower, the body you used (with all its quirks and strengths) would be uploaded to the server, potentially appearing as a Hater to make the climb even harder. This small addition to the formula made climbing the Tower an interesting endeavor, every corner hiding curveballs to which you’d have to adapt.
But to me the best part of Let it Die’s online component were those base invasions. When you start the game you’re quickly set up in a hub with shop NPCs, as well as a storage point for in-game resources: Coins and blue metal. Gaining these as you progress through the tower is the norm, but you can also hop on a train and ride to the bases of other players to take from their stockpile. You’d have to fight off the bodies they have in storage, packing all the weapons and armour they’ve got, but if you can it massive payouts could be yours.
This was great. It allowed some degree of interaction between the community, even if you didn’t get to hang around with them face-to-face. There are always dangerous, mysterious entities around, popping up in your home and in your travels. Making up you shore up your defences, meanwhile, as well as powering up your body-of-choice for the ascent up the Tower, acted as the two halves of Let it Die’s appeal. That ‘oh darn’ moment when you come back to a ransacked base was a real motivator, and pushed you to make sure all your bodies were buffed up, not just your go-to favourite.
So with servers being turned off, losing these components of the game is a shame. But while we’re losing these bits of the game, what we’re getting in return offers hope. On the official blog post announcing the offline version, all Deathmetal (premium currency) purchases are being removed. What utility these provided will either be purchasable with in-game currency you can just earn by playing, or simply removed entirely.
This essentially removes one of the more offputting blotches from Let it Die. An extension to the number of bodies you can have? Put your wallet away, you can earn it by playing. Daily and weekly items you can buy, previously throwing a brick at steady player power progression? Gone! The ability to continue a run after you die, rather than resetting from the start? This one felt especially rough, and now you can just buy it with coins.
As such Let it Die may, actually, be a more appealing game offline, particularly for those once intrigued by the quirkiness but pushed away by microtransactions. The ability to invade players’ bases will go to, replaced with CPU-controlled enemies, and so it’s not the same. But as a sacrifice for this new era of Let it Die? It may just be worth it.
So if you’ve not tried Let it Die and saw the news of its servers closing down as bad news – yeah, it kind of is. But it’s also an opportunity to try out a genuinely fantastic little action game without all the baggage. You may just find that as one coffin door closes for Let it Die, another opens. One that could keep it out of the grave for a good while longer.
