Dead Weight Review: Into the Breach in a Flying Pirate Ship, With Room to Refine

Sky pirates, ancient gods, and a lot of shoving

Dead Weight released on Steam on 16 July 2026 from Klukva Games, published alongside Spaghetti Cat. It casts you as the captain of a flying pirate ship exploring a steampunk world of floating islands, hiring crew and choosing between several distinct heroes as you search for loot, fight rival sky pirates, and eventually confront a set of newly-awakened Ancient Gods. It's a roguelite in the structural sense — runs end, meta-progression carries forward, and death sends you back to town — but its identity is defined almost entirely by its combat: small, tightly-designed tactical battlefields where the central joy, as dozens of reviewers put it in almost identical language, is figuring out how to "yeet" enemies off the edge of the map.

Into the Breach's DNA, filtered through a sky-pirate lens

The comparison to Subset Games' Into the Breach comes up in a large share of the review sample, and it's an earned one: battles take place on small, information-dense grids where enemy intentions are telegraphed in advance, and success depends on manipulating positioning — pushing, redirecting, or baiting enemies into hazards or off ledges — rather than simply outdamaging them. Several reviewers extend the comparison further, describing the overall package as closer to "Into the Breach meets Darkest Dungeon" or, more evocatively, "Skies of Arcadia plus Into the Breach plus Darkest Dungeon," pointing to specific character designs that echo Skies of Arcadia's own sky-pirate cast. It's a strong pedigree to invoke, and the moment-to-moment tactical puzzle-solving — working out how to chain a push into an environmental hazard, or bait an enemy into attacking a teammate instead of you — earns real, specific praise from a wide swath of the sample as "addicting," "rewarding," and "puzzle-y" in exactly the way its influences are.

Where Dead Weight distinguishes itself mechanically is in its RPG layer: multiple playable heroes with distinct skill trees and equipment slots, forged weapons that can be upgraded through a crafting system, and meta-progression that unlocks new characters and permanent bonuses across runs. Reviewers who stuck with the game past the opening hours generally report combat opening up considerably once a second or third hero and a meaningful equipment loadout come into play, several specifically praising how differently characters like Berry, Zeula, and Lumiere play from one another.

A resource economy players can't agree on

The most consistently cited frustration in the sample is the game's fuel and fatigue systems: fuel is consumed traveling between encounters and forces a run to end when it runs dry, while fatigue accumulates from exploration and combat and eventually forces a return to town. A substantial number of reviewers describe these systems as actively unpleasant rather than tense — one detailed negative review calls the fuel mechanic "extremely premature" in cutting runs short, and another flatly states that fatigue "punishes the player for exploring" rather than creating meaningful risk-reward tension. Notably, other reviewers push back hard on this exact criticism, arguing the systems stop mattering entirely once a few cheap meta-progression unlocks are purchased, which suggests the early-game economy is tuned tightly enough that a rocky first few hours can color a player's entire impression of the game one way or the other.

A second recurring complaint concerns the item reforging system, where upgrading gear doesn't reliably make it stronger — some upgrade paths change a weapon's fundamental role, reduce its slot efficiency, or otherwise make it a downgrade in practice without the game clearly communicating this in advance. One of the most-upvoted reviews in the sample lays out a specific worked example showing an "upgraded" sword performing worse than its base form, a criticism echoed by several other players describing the interface as inconsistent about which mechanics apply to which items.

Presentation is the easiest sell

Almost nobody in the review sample has a bad word for the presentation. The pixel art is described repeatedly as gorgeous and distinctive, striking a steampunk tone that several reviewers compare favorably to Warhammer 40K's Adeptus Mechanicus aesthetic without feeling derivative of it, and the soundtrack — particularly a widely-praised intro theme — earns consistent, specific praise for setting an adventurous, nostalgic mood. At a NZ$16.99 asking price, reviewers repeatedly note that the presentation alone punches well above what the cost would suggest, and several explicitly frame the low price as a mitigating factor for the game's rougher mechanical edges.

Difficulty swings, late-game fatigue, and a developer that's still listening

Beyond the fuel and reforging complaints, the sample surfaces a genuine disagreement about difficulty itself: some reviewers describe cutting through the entire campaign on a first attempt with little resistance, while others report runs ending abruptly to what feels like an unfair combination of enemy spawns and unlucky positioning early on, before the player has enough tools to respond. That split shows up often enough that it reads less like a handful of outlier complaints and more like a genuine tuning inconsistency between the early and late game. A smaller number of reviewers also note that several of the encounters and story beats in a run's final stretch repeat with only minor variation, undercutting some of the momentum the game builds earlier on. Controller support draws specific, repeated criticism too — several players report it as unreliable or effectively unsupported, which is a real drawback on a genre-friendly device like the Steam Deck. A handful of reviews also allege an unusual volume of suspiciously generic five-star reviews around launch, though this claim isn't corroborated elsewhere in the sample and reads as speculation rather than established fact. On the positive side, multiple reviewers credit Klukva Games with being an active, responsive presence in the community, patching issues and engaging directly with feedback in ways that make the rough edges feel more like a work in progress than a finished, abandoned product.

Verdict

Dead Weight is a genuinely enjoyable tactics roguelite that borrows confidently from Into the Breach and Darkest Dungeon and mostly earns the comparison, particularly once its RPG systems and hero variety open up past the first few hours. Its pixel art and music are easy recommendations on their own, and the core positional combat — baiting, pushing, and shoving enemies to their doom on tiny, carefully-designed battlefields — is a satisfying enough hook to carry a full run. But a punishing, inconsistently-received fuel-and-fatigue economy and an item upgrade system that can silently make your gear worse keep this from matching the polish of the games it's clearly chasing. At its budget price point, it's an easy recommendation for tactics fans willing to tolerate some rough edges; players expecting Into the Breach's surgical precision should adjust expectations accordingly.