
Dead Effect
Skip · Shooter · 2014
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $4.99.
- Length
- 3.7h
- Value
- $1.35/hr
- Reviews
- 73% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Dead Effect is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, Nvidia 8800 GTX | Radeon HD 4770, 3 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Fight for your life in the INDIE SCI-FI FPS game fit for both casual and hard-core gamers with a passion for hunting down hordes of zombies. Prepare yourselves for the incoming nightmare!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $0.99. That was March 2016. 113 discounts in the 12 years on record. They run about 80 percent off, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
It is cheaper than 77 percent of its genre. Arizona Sunshine® VR Legacy ($14.99, scores 38) outscores it, and so does The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners ($19.99, scores 58). Both sit among its closest neighbours.
59 from critics against 73 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
Steam's global achievement data says about 7 percent of players ever finish it. On a 3.7-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 472 of its Steam-purchase reviews; none were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 56 percent of the 1,033 reviews written there were positive, against 73 percent overall, and those are 35 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 3.7 hours. Doing everything runs 14, 3.6 times as long.
The drop-off
56% start to 7% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 3.7-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
6 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Silly little game with decent gunplay and over the top voice acting that made the journey for me entertaining till the end credits. I like the idea of every map have a certain amount of achievements as extra side objects.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Dead Effect scores 36/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/286040/dead-effectThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 20, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.