Dead By Extraction

The good: Great game, lots and lots of playable content. Good creative gameplay with plenty of challenges, devs did a great job. The Bad: absolutely impossible to play without ads. The Ugly: Seriously, so many ads you don’t get it. Expect to see a new ad between every 15-30 seconds of game play. Each round should take 20 minutes to complete about 5 minutes of that time was spent playing the game. You can purchase a temporary reprieve from ads, consider it about $5 per hour if you skipped all ads. Overall, good game. I’d love to see a “trial game” in this ad format, and a triple A price tag for the ad free version. - I’d pay $5 to never have to expand the backpack.

I genuinely enjoy “Dead by Extraction.” The core gameplay loop is tense, addictive, and super replay-able, exploring creepy maps, looting, surviving, and extracting. It’s one of those games I USED to keep coming back to because the actual gameplay feels fresh and fun. That said, the monetization is extremely frustrating. Every map forces you to watch 6+ ads (each over a minute long) just to fully explore all the rooms and maximize your loot. One ad is even required if you want to carry more items out. You end up wasting 6–8 minutes per match just watching ads, which completely kills the momentum and turns an exciting game into an ad-watching simulator. The “ad skip” packs (30 skips for $5) only last about 5 matches before you’re stuck again. I’d happily pay a fair monthly subscription to remove ads entirely, but the current system feels like robbery. On top of that, the customer support is abysmal. It’s been almost 3 weeks since I purchased items that never arrived in my account. I’ve been back and forth with support multiple times and there’s still zero progress or resolution. It’s incredibly disappointing. If the devs fixed the aggressive forced ads and actually provided decent support (plus a proper ad-free subscription option), this would easily be a 5-star game. Right now the great gameplay is being held back by greedy monetization and poor post-sale service. Huge letdown.

I don’t write reviews often, but this deserves one. Your game is genuinely fun. That’s what makes this so frustrating. The entire gameplay loop is engineered around forcing ads down the player’s throat. You are NOT extracting without dying unless you watch ads. That’s not bad luck. That’s not difficulty. That’s intentional design. Everything is locked behind ads. Need lives? Ad. Want an additional room? Ad. Need weapon upgrades? Ad. Need to continue a run? Ad. Need to actually progress at a reasonable pace? More ads. I understand developers need to make money. Nobody expects a free game to survive on goodwill alone. But your monetization crossed the line from “supporting the game” into actively disrespecting the player and the players time. A $30 MONTHLY subscription that doesn’t even remove ads is insane. Instead, you give players 10 ad skips. Lol 10. That’s maybe an hour of gameplay before you’re right back to watching 45 to 90 second ads again for basic progression. It honestly feels insulting. And the length of the ads is what finally killed it for me. The second I got hit with a 90 second ad just to continue playing, I was done. Completely done. Your game is good. But it is absolutely not good enough to justify wasting this much of people’s actual time. Right now the game feels less like entertainment and more like a hostage negotiation with ad breaks. You need to seriously rethink this system because the gameplay is being buried under greed.