Deathchron from Ratalaika Games and Crescent Moon is an action platformer where you’ll take control of a mech to stop an alien army. Check our Deathchron review!

 

In the recent past, an ordinary kid receives an urgent television transmission. Shortly afterward, an incredible battle mech known as the Deathchron arrives at his suburban home.

Our young hero is then transported to an alternate reality where robots have taken over everything, and he has one chance to stop this dystopian vision from coming true.

In Deathchron from Ratalaika Games and Crescent Moon Games, you’ll take control of a young kid that gets a battle mech called the Deathchron which he can board in. Your mission? To defeat the nasty evil aliens that have invaded.

 

As you wander through the levels, your robot can fire at enemies. You’ll often have to get off the mech and (slowly) walk as the kid to hack some terminals to progress. Depending on the situation, you’ll often have to switch between the robot and the kid. You’ll also want to upgrade your mech as soon as you can. The first update you should aim for is the health upgrade. After that, get the triple shot, which is good for damaging bosses at close range.

About the levels, at first glance they felt reminiscent of the early 8-bit Mega Man games, but unfortunately, this is where the comparison ends. The level design in Deathchron is very linear, but enemy placement for platforming segments feels on the cheap side of things, with hits that can send you flying down bottomless pits.

This game is far from perfect, and I encountered a few annoying design issues. The worst for me was the checkpoint system as the game is balanced on the hard side, and the checkpoints are far from one another and is unforgiving as you will likely have to redo levels from the very beginning quite often.

The fact that the checkpoints were far apart also raised other issues. For example, the kid doesn’t jump as high as the robot, and in one instance, the kid fell off a platform where the robot could easily jump on, but the kid couldn’t. The kid is a sitting duck, and unfortunately, I needed to reset to the previous checkpoint, loosing a few minutes of progress due to a design issue.

I also encountered another issue where the robot was standing on the button of a platform, which allowed the platform to move to the right, and I got off the robot. The platform continued with the robot, and I once again needed to restart and be sent back to the previous checkpoint. The game also crashed on me once when I was just walking with the mech and didn’t do anything special. Thanks to the checkpoints being very far apart, I lost about 10 minutes of gameplay, which was infuriating, to say the least.

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Being a Ratalaika game, this game includes a very short trophy list composed of 11 Gold trophies and a Platinum. You’ll need to progress through the first few bosses of the game, and buy a few upgrades to unlock it. All in all, you’re looking at about one hour and change to achieve this skill-and-luck-based Platinum trophy. This game is also Cross-Buy between the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions, so you could achieve two Platinum trophies if you’re persistent.

Deathchron had a game trailer that piqued my interest, but, unfortunately, the many issues met in this game broke the experience for me. I mentioned how I liked the Mega Man-like presentation, but the level design wasn’t up to this standard. Having checkpoints so far from one another is usually fine, but in this case, I met a few bugs where the mech and the kid got separated, which meant certain death and even had the game crash on me. Deathchron is available as a Cross-Buy title, so your $7.99 purchase will allow you to download the game’s PS4 and PS5 versions at no extra cost.

Disclaimer
This Deathchronn review is based on a PlayStation copy provided by Ratalaika Games.