From the moment I first heard of DeathSpank coming to PSN, I knew I had to get it. As an old Monkey Island fan I couldn't let anything Ron Gilbert slip past me - and besides, the premise looked interesting enough: An manly superhero battling his way through hordes of evil, with glory everywhere? Sure, sign me up!
I was intrigued as to DeathSpank's grand adventure to acquire "The Artifact", even if I was a little put off by the fact that you basically start the game at the END of DeathSpank's glorious adventure (I know it's probably part of the joke). But pretty quickly I realized that the story isn't the high point here. The main story is for the most part either hardly explained (what IS it with that goddamn Artifact?!) or feels like simply stalling for time - most of the quests are in the standard "Go here, slay beast, pick up loot, return to quest giver". Well, basically ALL the quests are like that with very few exceptions, and certainly none that vary from the tried-and-true Diablo scheme.
Gameplay-wise DeathSpank plays much like the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games - you steer DeathSpank (and his sidekick, if you're playing coop) around, and can use up to four equipped weapons, as well as four equipped items/foods/potions. None of this feels particularly fresh, and the gameplay certainly can't be called innovative in any way.
The graphics are strange and some kind of surreal blocky - that's not to say they are "bad", as I'm pretty sure the designers were aiming for this look on purpose, but I still can't help but feel it sometimes looks like a PS2-game...
The soundtrack consists of some slightly rocking instrumentals that manage to annoy more than they please, and to me they didn't fit into the world at all, but rather sounded like something akin to elevator music.
So, that was a lot of rant. What's good about this game, then? It has an undeniable charm, and a humor that often had me laughing out loud. Some of the jokes in this game are actually pretty clever, and a lot of people will probably not understand much of the underlying humor.
Adding to that, DeathSpank himself is probably the most charismatic protagonist I've seen in a game this year so far. In the beginning, I thought of him as "oh look, just another superhero parody *yawn*", but as time went by, I started to like him and his constant bravery and talk about glory and heroes - it's as if Johnny Bravo decided to battle evil instead of looking for girls. Much of the charm is thanks to the excellent voicework by Michael Dobson, which really benefits DeathSpank.
As for the other characters in the game... meh, they're not really that interesting (and a lot of them sound alike). Only very few of them leave a lasting impression, but those that do are often genuinely funny.
...and then it's suddenly over. The game is extremely short. Being a PSN game I of course couldn't expect much more, but it's still a crying shame. You could always go sidequesting, and there are quite a few of those, but, again, they all mostly amount to you acting delivery boy - "find 10 X and slaughter 5 Y". This gets old VERY fast.
As for trophies, they're all disappointingly easy to get. I got 100% mere minutes after completing the game.
I'll definitely hope for a sequel - mainly because DeathSpank is too good a hero to go to waste.
tl;dr
DeathSpank is a very fun game, with a well realised world and a really great protagonist. Apart from that it's just another Dark Alliance clone.Buy it if you want a quick laugh, but don't expect much more than that.