Dead Weight Review Guide – Combat

Dead Weight thrusts players into a sky-bound roguelike where resource management isn’t just a mechanic—it’s survival. Navigating an archipelago of floating islands, you juggle fuel, fatigue, and unexpected events as goblin pirates and eldritch gods test your wits and resilience. Tackling this game means mastering its balance between attack, positioning, and endurance, which can be as thrilling as it is punishing in early runs.

The game opens you up to a vast expanse of cloudy skies dotted with mysterious islands. Your airship serves as your vessel and lifeline, ferrying you closer to danger or reprieve depending on your choices. As you plot routes between islands, resource management quickly becomes a cornerstone of survival.

Fuel is your constant companion—and potential nemesis. Each flight consumes this crucial resource, forcing you to weigh risk against reward when exploring new territories. If fuel runs dry, your run ends abruptly, especially frustrating before you can establish a steady fuel supply by reaching gas station islands or purchasing barrels back in town.

Striking the right balance between progression and rest is equally vital. Visiting too many islands without respite wears on your party’s stamina, edging you closer to exhaustion. Rest spots like taverns or certain event islands provide vital relief, staving off not only physical fatigue but also creeping madness that can unleash tentacle horrors mid-battle.

This layered resource dance between fuel, exhaustion, and madness isn’t just clever—it shapes every decision you make on the cloud sea. However, exploration quickly reveals limited variety in island content, nudging the player’s focus sharply onto the turn-based battles that define Dead Weight’s core.

Combat is a classic turn-based strategy experience refined through Dead Weight’s unique mechanics. Positioning is king; understanding attack ranges and leveraging every movement is essential. You control multiple heroes, each able to perform two actions per turn with the strategic limitation that non-movement actions can only be executed once per turn.

Your arsenal includes default attacks and special moves unlocked by equipping different weapons found during your runs. A standout tactic involves pushing enemies off the islands’ precarious edges—any foe sent flying suffers an instant kill regardless of their health, turning positioning from a defensive tool into a lethal weapon.

While enemies come with their own patterns, the real challenge lies in your character’s fragility. Starting with just three hit points, mistakes are costly. Thankfully, enemies telegraph their moves using red squares, enabling careful players to avoid damage by prioritizing safe tiles—movement becomes as crucial as offense.

Defeat means starting over, but not entirely from scratch. Your cumulative enemy kills translate into offerings that unlock favors from the gods. These upgrades grant benefits like higher starting levels or more efficient fuel consumption, providing a satisfying sense of progression between runs and rewarding persistence.

Battles early in your adventure can drag, mainly because your party begins with only one hero dealing minimal damage. Recruiting allies from the tavern requires gold and sufficient fuel reserves to return to town—a risky investment given many recruits possess just a single hit point, raising the stakes in each engagement.

Friendly fire plays an intriguing role in combat. Though it might seem like a nuisance, it often works to your advantage when enemies accidentally damage themselves. This unintended chaos can drastically shorten battles, alleviating some monotony in the game’s combat flow.

Despite some strategic variety, Dead Weight’s combat loop tends to settle into a repetitive rhythm: attack, then move to safety. While this formula works well enough to survive boss encounters and regular fights alike, it sacrifices depth for predictability, which can dull the excitement after extended play.

Even so, some boss fights spice things up with unpredictable attack sequences and tactical traps that test your positioning skills. Yet for the most part, caution and patience carry the day, as the combat rarely demands taking risks that might backfire spectacularly.

The moments I found most challenging usually stemmed from lapses in judgment—like being caught near enemies capable of counterattacks or getting boxed in with no escape. These rare snafus served as the main sources of tension amidst an otherwise methodical and deliberate combat pace, which may feel stale after several plays.

Visually, Dead Weight opts for clarity and functionality over flair. The map and arena visuals clearly outline traversable spaces and strategic obstacles, offering a clean battlefield view. Character sprites for hired allies blend a bit too easily with the enemy designs, which occasionally leads to confusion, though your main hero always stands out distinctly.

Technical hiccups did disrupt my experience at times, with several instances of the game crashing—particularly after intense boss fights. Thankfully, frequent autosaves before battles mean you won’t lose substantial progress, but the interruptions can still break immersion and momentum.

Ultimately, Dead Weight presents an interesting concept wrapped in solid but occasionally repetitive mechanics. Its blend of resource juggling and positioning-based combat holds promise, but the slow pacing and lack of combat variety weaken its overall engagement, making it a tough recommendation for players seeking a deep or evolving roguelike challenge.

Dead Weight
Platform: PC
Genre: Turn-Based Strategy
Developer: Klukva Games
Release Date: July 16, 2026
Approximate Playtime: 12 Hours

Unfortunately, Dead Weight’s combat system is a bit of a one-trick pony. Once you have gotten used to the simple loop of attacking enemies and then moving to the safest tile, you’ll have essentially mastered the game and won’t be dying any time soon.

The game will attempt to spice things up with a few interesting boss fights that can keep the player on their toes with unpredictable attack patterns that could potentially trap you if you rush to a ledge, but as long as the player is careful, they’ll be able to go through most of the game without taking damage at all.

Most of the bad situations I got into in this game were caused either by a minor lapse of judgement (such as staying too close to an enemy who can counter when attacking) or because I was trapped in a corner without any way to move. These being the only two ways I was ever in danger, while most battles ended up being a monotonous repeat of the same few actions I could perform each turn, made battles in this game a dull slog after the first few attempts.

Visuals and Technical Issues

Visually, Dead Weight is a passable game. The sprite work and visuals of the map always make it clear where you can stand and which parts of the stage can be used as obstacles to push enemies into. The sprites of the party you can hire are probably the weakest element, as they easily blend into the group of enemies you’ll be fighting, often resulting in horrible mistakes, but the hero you started as is always easily identifiable.

The best-looking parts of the game are the various pieces of artwork that appear during the game’s event islands. The artists for this game have a good feel for sprite work, portraits, and environmental details.

Sadly, outside of the event art and the occasional good-looking boss, there wasn’t much in Dead Weight that wowed me visually, but I wouldn’t say that the game looks bad by any metric.

I also faced several technical issues during my playthrough; in particular, I experienced multiple game crashes. Thankfully, these crashes didn’t result in lost progress as the game autosaves every time you enter a battle, but it was undeniably frustrating to reach the end of a boss battle only to have the game window close and need to start the fight over from scratch.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, while I found Dead Weight to be an overall passable game with a few interesting gameplay concepts, its combat and gameplay loop would quickly get tedious and made the process of repeating a run after I died much more of a chore than it needed to be as a result. For those reasons, this is a game that I struggle to recommend to others.

Dead Weight