Deadshot: the retro shooter that outguns its small-game reputation

Built and published by the same small team, this mutant shooter is a solo affair with no co-op — and it wins over the very players who opened its store page expecting little.

A store page that seems to doubt itself

Deadshot's own store page is the first thing working against it: the name means little to anyone, and v0lt shows up as both the studio and the distributor, with no publisher standing behind it to lend credibility. One player admitted to carrying exactly that suspicion into the game — and only shaking it off after playing. Deadshot arrived on September 18, 2024.

The setup wakes you as a soldier in the middle of an apocalypse that turned everyone into mutants overnight, with no explanation given — and finding that explanation is what keeps you shooting, pushing through tunnels, labs, office blocks and warehouses for the items that open the way forward. The campaign runs three chapters of six levels each. Its score is credited on the store to three names: White Eyes, Noxtromo and Torturerr.

The doubters stuck around for another round

The same turnaround keeps coming up among those who played: the modest listing promised little, and the game delivered faster than the doubt could hold out. That is how it went for one player with 5 hours on the clock in September 2025 — wary of the small team and the unknown name at the start, praising the pace and the soundtrack by the end.

You don't have to memorize any pattern to move forward, and that too became a compliment: a player who finished the campaign with 12 hours logged in October 2024 called the enemies' simplicity a welcome breather, and came away talking about a joke the studio itself tucked away about making the game.

Not all of it is praise without reservation: a player with 3 hours saw the game freeze while loading a new level, and one who took the challenge on with 1 hour found the soundtrack too aggressive for their taste — even while praising a difficulty that's easy to learn and hard to master. Barbs aside, the pool of players who have been through it is small, and those who pass through it on Steam, where the game is sold, come out recommending it.

For solo players who don't care about the plot

Anyone coming for a story leaves early: even the players who recommend it call the plot weak and linear, and the payoff doesn't live there. It's the trigger that holds you — the rhythm from level to level, the enemy that shows up too fast to think about, without forcing you to run the same room over and over to memorize the right pattern.

This is a solo experience: no co-op, no one on the other end sharing the mutant hunt. It plays fine on a controller too, with native support for the DualSense and the DualShock 4, which nudges it toward the couch for those who prefer that — but it stays one person against the apocalypse, start to finish.

The doubt lives on the store page, not in the playing. Those who arrive wary of the small team tend to leave playing another round; for those who arrive after a story worth remembering, that doubt never clears.