It’s hard to distill Dillons Dead Heat Breakers into succinct paragraphs. There is no elevator pitch for Dillons Dead Heat Breakers. There is no “Deckbuilding Rougelike with wholesome elements” tagline for steam users to grok onto. There isn’t a 3 tier skill tree. There are no “builds”. Nintendo will tell you it’s a Tower Defense game. It plays like a brawler and a racing combat game. You also run a shop, play pachinko, and do races for extra scratch in between gigs.

When the game starts your protagonist, your Mii associated with your 3DS device, is transforemed into a furry and then your character pantomimes witnessing an unspeakable disaster, before the rest of the scene fades in with you driving a huge truck and about to be obliterated by alien rock monsters. Then the titular hero of the game, Dillon, a mute cowboy armadillo who rescues your ass. You’re introduced by Dillon’s loyal assistant, a talking squirrel on a pedal powered helicopter. The new trio drives to The City, the last save place in the wasteland, where you take up residence in the hotel. To save the town you just fled from, you have to build a doomsday weapon, and in order to do that, you need parts, and you need money. There’s only one business in the wasteland that pays, and that’s protection. So the trio forms a freelance protection and defense force, hiring out contractors to fill the towers and helm the guns in each mission. In between missions you work odd jobs to finance and hire more contractors to take on bigger jobs, and also finance building the doomsday weapon.

The main game missions are tower defense in a very loose sense, you take the NPCs you hired and place them in towers. Then you, as Dillon, roll around the map and attack waves of walking rock enemies. It requires some strategy to navigate the map in a fast and effective manner, and you have to prioritize targets based on moment to moment positional information. You also have to keep towers charged with electricity by rolling over a little generator. It’s a lot to keep track of, and very stressful, which makes the breaks afforded by doing side business mini games on your off days much more “relaxing”.

The NPCs you hire as guns are actually other Mii you pick up in streetpass, remember street pass? They are reoccurring characters in this grind for survival, and if they perish in a mission they are “abducted” by the rock aliens and you can’t hire them again. When you end a mission with fewer people than you started, you feel like a real piece of shit.

Before each mission there’s a small vingette between your hired guns, dillon, and the inhabitants of the small town you’re supposed to protect. One guy is the replacement mayor and wasn’t even supposed to be here today. Another town is inhabited 100% with beefcake bull men. The dialog is funny without being cloying, and has just enough weight so that there feels like there’s stakes, but never tries to going to the “Games R SRS BSNS” contemporary game writing that tries to ape an HBO miniseries.

Dillons Dead Heat Breakers is so committed to the world that the Hotel you live in has a bar, which is where you hire the NPCs for the next battle. This bar also has a bartender, who will provide a shot that gives a temporary and maybe unnoticeable stat boost. There’s the gruff mole shopkeeper, who seems to know everything about the world and nothing about the world. If you find a bit of lego in one of the game maps and bring it back to him, he explains they were used by ninjas and scattered around to hurt anyone pursuing them, this works in a “stepping on legos is painful” joke in with the radical disconnect between the old world and the now. But lets say you fucked up a race, or didn’t make enough at the shop, then you’re behind and can’t hire enough NPCs. Well you can borrow money from Stranger, a pigeon dressed in all black, who is more than happy to loan you the money for a job. Dillon sleeps on the couch in your hotel room, because there’s 2 beds, one for you, and one for the Squirrel guy, and this says more about the character Dillon than 3 remakes of The Last Of Us ever could about Joel.

Animal Crossing lets you hang out in the game world and build relationships with it’s deizens, but Dillons Dead Heat Breakers understands the real world, where there’s bills to pay, mouths to feed, and shots to drink. Instead of everything in Animal Crossing existing for the player, the player has to survive in Dillons Dead Heat Breakers. The jobs in between missions range from working at a recycling center, to doing very well designed race sequences as Dillon, to running an entire store.

The store running mini game could be a game in and of itself. Anyone who has worked in a dingy store all by themselves will find nearly every element of that experience has been lovingly crafted. You arrange merchandise on shelves, you choose what to stock. You ring up customers, manually, using the 3DS’s touchscreen. If you’re fast enough, you get a bonus. You get a lunch break, which you can choose to work through or eat something. At the end of the shift, you see how much profit the store made, alongside your pay, hammering home the rigged game that is wage work. AAA games don’t have the balls to make a shop running mini game this well done. A director would scoff at how boring it would be, having himself never worked a cash register, cutting it immediately for 30 or 40 new gruesome execution animations, before buying 10 more funko pops.

In most post apocalyptic settings, the game designer is trying to impress upon you their worldview onto you and that humanity is not to be trusted, that “we” are the “real monsters” and once shit hits the fan the first thing you will lose will be your humanity, and you’ll be knifing people from behind as they play on their PS Vita. Dillons Dead Heat Breakers, by contrast, understands that even after the apocalypse you’ll still need to eat, still need to kick back with some gambling, and people still need to work together to survive. In this way, this is a more realistic portrayal than most other post apocalyptic media.

There’s more interesting ideas in Dillons Dead Heat Breakers than in most AAA games. Maybe they don’t all work right, maybe the economy is a little broken, maybe you play missions over and over to get money. So what. And it’s on a dead system, as an e-shop only title in the US, and soon to be disappeared as Nintendo shutters any legitimate way to play the game. This is a lost classic, having benefited from the mechanical refinements of 2 previous titles, a well realized world, and more charm than it needed.

–hellojed