"Despite four years of early access and multiple post-launch updates, Deadside is still little more than a worse version of better games."
Co-op Multiplayer.
PvP Multiplayer.
I have followed Deadside since it first entered early access in 2020, and despite wanting it to succeed, as competition is good for the genre, I have never found it to be a worthy competition of any of the titles currently in this space.
While the pace of development has been somewhat steady, Deadside has not improved in any significant way.
While many aspects of the game have changed, with the exception of the world map, which is a little more varied now, it does not feel like it has improved in any meaningful way.
When I originally played Deadside, combat against NPCs was incredibly unrewarding because they were so easy to kill.
It appears that the developers also felt that NPCs did not put up enough of a fight, resulting in some pretty major changes to PvE combat.
Unfortunately, those changes resulted in most NPCs being omniscient with the accuracy of Legolas while still having the tactical sense of a can of baked beans.
In a recent playthrough, a group of enemies with their backs to me, around 200m away, suddenly turned towards me and opened fire with incredible accuracy, shredding my health bar before I could find cover.
In another playthrough, I did manage to find cover, only for every NPC in the area to group up so close that their character models were clipping and opening fire on masse, once again shredding my health bar before I could get more than a few shots off.
While occasionally players will be able to find a good vantage spot and hold out against enemy patrols, for the most part, enemies will swarm towards players, even if they are barely visible and making no noise, a complete 180 from the original issue, which saw NPC standing around doing nothing while players murdered all of their friends.
As a result, while NPCs react very differently now than at launch, PvE combat overall is no more enjoyable than it was at launch, and in some ways, perhaps is even less enjoyable than it was at launch.
While the Deadside map is much more diverse than it used to be, and the developers have added many new points of interest, the problem remains that the vast majority of the map is non-interactable, with hundreds if not thousands of non-interactable buildings and vehicles.
In addition, many of the exploration locations are near carbon copies of other locations, down to the debris on the floor or the pictures on the wall, making the entire world feel more like a quickly thrown-together school project than a living, breathing world inhabited by people just trying to survive.
A perfect example of how this disrupts gameplay is how players are forced to build a base from scratch instead of taking over one of the dozens of empty buildings, fortifying it, and making it their own. This results in players being forced to waste time on busywork instead of engaging in PvP, the only real reason to play a game like Deadside, to begin with.
Weapon crafting and looting are another aspect of the game that has seen major changes, yet Deadside feels no more enjoyable to play now than it did at launch.
While weapons were far too easy to acquire originally, players are now forced to use damaged weapons with reduced accuracy to take on overpowered NPCs in hopes of looting a slightly less damaged weapon.
After exploring the map for several hours on official servers, I could only find shotguns and pistols, neither of which is very useful when dealing with NPCs that have the range and accuracy of a professional sniper.
While I agree the best weapons should not be easy to acquire, players should at least be able to find a hunting rifle occasionally as it is a common weapon in rural settings and one that would afford players far more options when it comes to dealing with threats than shotguns and pistols, both of which are better suited for close range encounters.
Despite being in early access for four years, character models are as generic as they come.
Players are only allowed to select which head they wish to use.
Four of the seven available faces are white, and there is only one face for other skin tones and no female character option.
Unfortunately, the only women you will see in the game are the scantily busty pinups scatted around the map and ironically plastered on the wall of the character creation screen.
Competing with a market leader is never easy, even when you are at similar stages of development.
Bad Pixel’s problem, even if they cannot see it yet, is that competing with two market leaders who constantly move forward while you are struggling to catch up to where they were five years ago is nearly impossible.
While Bad Pixel has so far stuck with Deadside, the pace of development is nowhere near enough to catch up with Rust and DayZ, which are not only vastly more popular but far better games that receive frequent updates and reap the full benefit of large and engaged communities.
Any team looking to dethrone either game must do so with a far more unique, polished, and interesting title than Deadside.
Deadside is not a bad game, per se, but it is a worse version of better games, and that has been its main problem since it entered early access almost five years ago.
With so many excellent titles competing for attention in 2025, there is very little reason to invest time and money into a game that is unlikely ever to be more than a mediocre title that is around five years behind its nearest competitors and is being developed at a much slower pace on a much smaller budget.
As much as every developer dreams of creating the game that dethrones Call of Duty, Fortnite or World of Warcraft, some genres are simply off-limits when trying to compete against the market leader when all you have to offer is a title of equal or lower quality.
The MMORPG genre is full of “WoW Killers” who struggle to stay online while World of Warcraft thrives.
Call of Duty has left a trail of “COD Killer” bodies behind it as it continues to be the most popular FPS on the market; even as I write this, we are weeks away from the most recent casualty (xDefiant) closing for good, while Call of Duty continues to be one of the most played games on all supported platforms.
The same is true of Fortnite, which has secured the battle royale throne and saw off competition from some of the biggest names in gaming. Activision, Ubisoft, and EA all failed to dethrone Fortnite despite many of their attempts being excellent titles in their own right.
There is still room at the top of most genres, but the survival genre already has some truly amazing titles.
While titles such as Deadside (and spin-off Duckside) are “decent enough,” there is no real reason to play them when demonstrably better games exist and can often be acquired for a similar price during sales.
There is nothing wrong with dreaming big, but developers must consider the cost of attempting to compete with a market leader before launching a new title in a highly competitive genre.
Failure to do so risks wasting not only their time and money but also the time and money of players who purchase the (failed) game they create.
For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.'” - Luke 14:28-30
Deadside is a survival video game developed by Bad Pixel and published by tinyBuild, it was released on 6 December 2024 and retails for $24.99.
Deadside is available on the following platforms: PC, Playstation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
As of March 2025, around 5000 people play Deadside on a fairly regular basis.
Deadside suffers from low activity, and while a moderate number of players continue to log in regularly, finding an active server is not easy and may require playing on a server with very high latency.
This activity rating is based only on the Deadside PC community; the console release is too new to gauge accurately and is inflated by trial accounts.
While tinyBuild has announced that 100,000 players had played Deadside on the console, they concluded this figure included trial users and did not reveal how many players purchased the game once the trial period ended.
However, Deadside is not among the top 40 most-played games on Xbox, indicating that many trial users did not purchase the game.
While there is no official ranking of PSN’s most-played titles, it appears nowhere in the top 100 most-played titles per third-party rackers such as PS-time Tracker, leading us to believe that it sold relatively few copies on that platform, too.
Deadside supports:
Cross-platform multiplayer is only supported between Xbox and Playstation users, with PC players unable to access console servers and vice versa.
Deadside offers the following matchmaking options:
The Deadside in-game store sells:
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Deadside is rated PEGI 16+ and contains:
While Deadside successfully combines elements of DayZ and Rust, the result is a product that is demonstrably less enjoyable than its inspiration.
While there is some fun to be had, I struggle to think of why anyone would choose to play Deadside when DayZ and Rust are readily available and are ultimately far more polished and enjoyable games.
For this reason, I cannot recommend Deadside, despite finding it to be a “decent enough game”.
We found Deadside to be a mediocre game, meaning that while it has some redeeming qualities, it's held back by noticeable flaws that prevent it from being truly enjoyable.
