There’s a decent arena shooter hidden deep within the wrinkled, lined pages of Drawn to Death. But it’s not worth flipping through page upon page of wretched jokes, schoolyard insults, and lame attempts at edginess in order to find said decent game. Drawn to Death is simply a mess that can’t provide a single good reason to give it a deeper reading.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept of a game that springs to life from the pages of an angsty but creative teenager’s notebook doodlings. Every time you launch Drawn to Death you get a view of this character’s classroom, stodgy teacher droning on in front and cute girl glancing back and smiling, before he looks down at his notebook and the main menu appears.

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“ Drawn to Death just doesn’t feel good to play.

It’s all downhill from there, though. Drawn to Death features a handful of intricate maps and creative modes, a half dozen deceptively complex characters, and a large variety of weapons that are admittedly fun to experiment with. There’s a shotgun, for example, that can sprout ax blades if you pull the trigger with precise timing, and a coffin that catapults corpses, which you reload by literally yanking a new one out of the dirt.

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“ Horribly unbalanced.

Perhaps worst of all is the fact that there’s no way to remap controls; jumping is mapped to “X,” and there’s no way to switch to a bumper-jumper style. In a game that clearly wants you to spend more time floating and double-jumping through the air than on the ground, requiring you to take your thumb off the aiming stick to jump is unforgivable.

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Drawn to Death is also horribly unbalanced. There are a few weapons – like the Russian Jackhammer and the Star Laser 3000 – that easily outperform everything else. Likewise with the character roster; each of the six avatars available at launch has a sizeable arsenal of unique moves, abilities, and special attacks, and some are just garbage compared with others. Alan, a seemingly pedophiliac teddy bear with a chainsaw, automatically regenerates health, turns invisible at will, and has powerful special attacks. Meanwhile, Johnny Savage, a guitar-wielding cockney punk, is basically useless because his unique abilities – a ground-slam and guitar attacks – require far too much precision to be reliable. That level of blatant disparity is a bad look for this type of game.

“ A host of bugs and network problems certainly don’t help.

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A host of bugs and network problems certainly don’t help. In some matches opponents will wind up somehow floating out in the single-ruled lines of nothingness above the map, able to gleefully snipe you with no chance of reprisal. Other times foes simply won’t take any damage from your weapons. Buttons often seem unresponsive, sometimes requiring multiple presses just to switch weapons. And the interface during matches could use some serious work, as it’s currently too hard to tell how much ammo you have left or when your abilities’ cooldowns are up.

“ Sophomoric and crass.

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“ Sends the same handful of taunts and insults your way multiple times per match.

It doesn’t even mix things up, sending the same handful of taunts and insults your way multiple times every single match. You can head into the options menu to turn off the horrendous narrator voice that interjects several times per match with bizarre non-sequiturs that seem to channel creator David Jaffe’s own stream-of-consciousness rants about the video game industry. But there’s no off switch for the scant handful of endlessly repeating lines of dialogue your characters hatefully spew dozens of times per match.

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All of this is really a massive shame. Despite all its flaws as a shooter there’s some depth and rewarding complexity in Drawn to Death, if you take the time to read between the lines. Unfortunately, it can’t help taking a dump on the page and shoving your face in it every time you try.