Critical Hit Games have teamed up with PLAION and created an absolute masterpiece which is broken down into a detective-inspired adventure game that will keep you on your toes from start to finish. It will keep you guessing who you know and who you can trust.

Nobody Wants to Die is a beautiful creation of New York City in the future year 2329 where the sky is dark but the neon is bright, and cars are flying around like you would see in Star Wars adventuring around Coruscant. You put on the shoes of Detective James Karra who is a broken-down man who has turned to drinking and taking illicit substances to control his life. James lost his wife who keeps coming back to him in flashbacks which is messing him up even more.

You’ve been suspended from the New York Police Department and you need to pass a test to get back, which your boss is not allowing you to do. There is a job that your boss needs to do on the down low and because you are currently suspended you are teamed up with a young police liaison named Sara Kai. Throughout the story, you and Sara become closer and find out more about each other which creates a great storyline as you start off not trusting each other.

You quickly find out the crimes are all linked up in a way and find out it’s a serial killer behind them all, and they’re hunting down the elite so you need to find who it is before he does much more or you might even agree with his actions.

Entering the crime scenes is not like you have ever done before, being able to investigate the crime scene using time manipulation augmentation and some advanced technologies to recreate the scene and get to the bottom of what has happened. You sometimes find more than what you’ve bargained for and it might lead you astray a little bit. It was a super cool feature to add to the whole detective theme.

I’m going to put this out there to start with. I was a little upset that I was unable to control the vehicles in the couple of parts where you were driving the flying cars around New York. There is something about titles that prompt you to pick things up and I will never walk past them. I always need to stop and inspect what this title allows you to do. Most of the things you pick up can be rotated and you can look at the fine details. The movement was great and reconstructing memory sequences for crime scenes was great and something that broke away from the standard controls a little as you needed to hold left trigger, right trigger, or sometimes both to recreate those scenes and work out the crime. I liked that there were some on-screen prompts for some of the controls if you forgot or needed that little helpful push.

There is something about the bright neon lighting up the city from the darkness and the futuristic looks that gets me so eager for these titles, and I was not disappointed in the slightest with how this game looked and felt. Nobody Wants to Die is based in the future and the developers have not left out details in the slightest, from how the vehicles looked to how they recreated New York City each crime scene felt like it was specially created and lots of time and effort was put into each one, which was something that immersed me into this title. I loved the attention to detail the developers put into everything you looked at in this title.

I could become super picky and mention that a couple of areas could have been darker to utilize the torch, but that is fine picking through a title that looks absolutely stunning. I was impressed with the character models and how realistic they looked. Unfortunately, the only thing I could pick negatively about the character models is when they were speaking their mouths looked like they just sucked on a lemon and then proceeded to start talking. I’ll always be in a wow factor seeing what developers can produce with the current technology.

The audio in this title was quite simplistic but it could be due to the part in the title being the voice acting, and needless to say, it dragged me further into the story than I would have expected. The developers pulled in well-known voice actors like Phillip Sacramento who played James Karra and Keaton Talmadge who was the voice of Sara Kai, and with each bit of voice dialogue, you could hear the emotion in their voices which brought another level to the story. You could hear that James was struggling and you could hear that slight glimpse of happiness when he was doing what he loved. Then you have other characters like Sara who you would not pick the situation she was in but seeing her easily painted the picture even more and just proved the point you should not judge a book from its cover.

Nobody Wants to Die is a masterpiece about being able to solve crimes in an original way in a picturesque futuristic New York City, with great voice acting and a story that will drag you right in. I highly recommend anyone chasing a game where you can just sit down, relax, and play the game.

Written by: Hayden Nelson