Dead Frost

Christmas is not usually associated with violence or explosions, but video games and movies made sure to make even this historically peaceful holiday into the perfect occasion for John McClane to blow up buildings and neutralize terrorists. Hence, there are plenty of X-mas video games out there as well that feature a lot of action.

Dead Frost is an arcade platformer in which you play as a special agent trying to neutralize hundreds of robots that threaten to destroy the world. On top of that, evil Santa is also one of the main villains, so there’s definitely a lot of action on your plate. Unfortunately, the gameplay is pretty annoying and repetitive, not to mention extremely unoriginal.

Your goal is to freeze and destroy the robots using your special gun. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time, and the robots shoot at you very quickly. There’s no way to block or avoid their bullets without disrupting your freeze ray, which means that you are forced to stand and take it. Since you usually have to take on multiple enemies, this becomes a real problem when you are left with little health after the first encounter.

The level design is kept as simple as possible, which means that the experience gets repetitive in a rush. Seeing the same environments all the time makes it difficult to keep going, especially when the mechanics are so poorly implemented. Speaking of which, you can also use a hook to latch onto high objects or pull robots toward you, although the latter is rarely a useful tactic.

The graphics are nothing to write home about either, since they are actually very basic and unimpressive. You quickly get bored of seeing the same backgrounds over and over again, not to mention the fact that the enemy variety is almost non-existent. Even the music is poorly chosen for this type of game, which only adds to the overall stress levels.

In the end, jolly is not what you feel after playing Dead Frost, so maybe this shouldn’t be the game you play on Christmas. Thus, it needs way better level design and some kind of new ideas in the gameplay department to make it worth your time.