Dead as Disco Early Access Review

Please let me take Dead as Disco back in time with me to the early 2010s.

You better believe I would have put the thousands of mp3s I had downloaded to work. Remember those days? Back when mp3 blogs just gave you ways to download songs that you could upload to your iPod. Or your laptop actually had an optical drive and you could burn a CD that would play in your car. Now everything is streaming and it just feels like we’ve lost some of the magic.

So yeah, Dead as Disco gives players the ability to upload songs they can use to beat the piss out of thugs to. And it can be done in tune to the rhythm. Or, if you’re really crazy, tinker with the song’s beat and try and manipulate your own manageable punching pace. For a lot of people, that’s an instant sell. Because who doesn’t love the ability to add a bit of customization and personal taste to their game?

Dead as Disco has a great shot at being one of 2026’s viral sensations. On May 5, the game fully launched into Early Access on PC, giving players a decent taste of what’s to come when the game fully launches sometime within the next year.

It’s not often that I touch games in Early Access. One of the primary reasons was because I haven’t had a decent enough way to play PC games in quite some time. My desktop is almost ten years old and the laptop I have feels like it’s going to catch on fire when I try to play even the most basic titles. But after getting a newer laptop as a little birthday treat for myself, I’ve been trying to explore the PC space more. More importantly, time is limited and I often prefer to play games when they are mostly feature complete.

But after seeing Dead as Disco in action during a recent independent games showcase, I had to have a taste for myself.

Let’s just get the formalities out of the way. Dead as Disco is in Early Access. Over time, developer Brain Jar Games is going to slowly roll out updates to it. This could be in the form of more boss fights, more story, technical improvements, and anything else under the sun. In its current form, four main fights are available that flesh out what I imagine the full game will be. Additionally, players can brawl in an infinite arena or engage with custom challenges, assigning songs and enemies in any form they wish. There’s also cosmetic options that can be unlocked through playing the game.

Dead as Disco‘s current iteration does feel a bit paltry, that’s simply the nature of the beast. When I started up the game I was given a brief tutorial with some exposition but I felt a bit out of sorts. I’m Charlie Disco and I’m dead? Death in the form of a disco ball-like skull is giving me a chance at life. But I’ve got to guide Charlie in his fight against his former band mates after they’ve been corrupted by a seemingly maniacal and monopolistic entity or person or corporation named Harmony? Okay, sure.

My hope is that Brain Jar Games is working on a full campaign here. There’s writing, voice acting, and cutscenes. However, almost everything is contained within those four individual fights that are selected from a menu. Everything else is currently locked out, including the “Multiplayer” selection on the main menu… curious.

There isn’t much to say about the narrative in its current iteration. That being said, I’m extremely interested on what led to Charlie Disco’s death and the history between him and his band. Brain Jar Games seems to be leaning towards crafting a narrative that acts as commentary on the music industry. It made me think of People of Note and how it tries to make fantastical references to music’s current world.

Obviously music is the core of Dead as Disco. Charlie and the player square off against four “Idols” whose fights act as elaborate music videos and multi-stage battle arenas. Each Idol fight takes part in thematically wild spaces meant to reflect real-world locales or performance venues, usually with a flair for dramatic opulence and ways to feel mechanically distinct from each other. Charlie will engage in a bit of banter with his new rivals and then they will clash, usually exchanging blows or fending off grunts while the boss takes a break.

Dead as Disco‘s combat can best be described as a spin on the Batman: Arkham games, except Charlie doesn’t zip to enemies with a similar kind of grace. Players are meant to time their attacks to the beat of the music–which is easier said than done–and doing so will net more overall points and help charge up the meter for special attacks. Enemy attacks can be countered and dodged, most of which are indicated by a prompt above the foe’s head. Timing it at the last moment scores more points and opens up the enemy for a strong follow-up attack.

Whether during an Idol fight or a custom track, Brain Jar Games has done a pretty remarkable job of syncing up attacks with the beat. Because of lag input and no doubt partially because the game is still being worked on, there could be room for improvement. But I’ll admit, I couldn’t truly detect any glaring issues during my fights. Part of that might simply boil down to the fact that I too had a lot of room for improvement with working on my timing.

Charlie’s punches feel hefty. Throwing a drumstick at a distant foe and then blinking over to them is fluid and stylish, especially when you nail it at a moment where the track hits hard. Enemies have enough of a grace period where they telegraph hard-hitting moves that players have a generous window to counter and doge, though I really tried to focus on performing with perfect timing. Enemy variety is definitely minimal at the moment with almost everyone feeling like a grunt that can be dispatched with a handful of blows. There’s not really a sense that Dead as Disco has “special” units outside of the ones that can soak up a hit or seem to emphasize attacks that must be dodged before they can really be harmed.

For this Early Access period, the focus really seems to be on showing off the potential of the Idol fights. My favorite two were Dex and Arora. Dex has been transformed by Harmony, his body fused with wires as he floats around the battlefield like a robotic octopus. His stage features a kind of screamo rock track expressing his goth-like style. The fight has Charlie fending off shadowy figments of inner torment, dodging Dex’s lightning on a kind of pyramid, and watching a digital version of the Idol seemingly rip a tear in reality. As a pop star fueled by AI, Arora is fought across colorful scenery while her bouncy music plays. All the while, she becomes ethereal and god-like, cronies attacking Charlie while she glows golden.

Prophet is a rap star and his fight transitions from a small back alley, to a road where cars rush in to hurt anyone in their path, to a massive stadium where fans flock and chant. At one point, Prophet literally sends a flurry of lyrics in the form of stark yellow text directly at Charlie, the player having to hold down the counter button. Prophet’s fight was a bit slower than the other three as the music focuses on a steady beat and patient punches. My least favorite of the Idol fights was the punk rocker Hemlock. There’s a cool moment where the fight switches to a 2.5D perspective on a train as Charlie moves to the right to progress. But Hemlock’s song doesn’t resonate like the others and his spaces aren’t as fun to fight in.

This leaves me curious as to what the other Idols will be like in Dead as Disco and what work can be done to tune up the currently existing ones. The subjective nature of music means that not every track is going to have the same impact for all players but I think there is some universal appeal to what’s on offer here. The beat can’t be too furious and too weird because players need to be able to judge combat timing but it also has to fit within the genre of that specific Idol. But it’s also funny to think how Charlie was in a band with people who potentially went out and made their own vastly different music.

I think a few players may find issue with the checkpoints of the fights, merely because on run where you don’t die, Idol battles can last five minutes or longer. I never really got the sense there was anything I could do to boost Charlie’s damage he did to the Idols and that fights had a soft predetermined length to them. In one agonizing moment I died to Prophet when he literally had one hit left and was taken back to the second-to-last phase, where the final bit of his fight is already quite long for those wanting to play it safe.

There are cool transitions in the Idol fights where the playable space changes, an animated cutscene comes out of nowhere, or the Idol takes enough damage to initiate a cool cinematic beatdown. I honestly hope these four fights are the tamest of the batch because Dead as Disco has a lot of style right now. I love Charlie’s Travis Touchdown vibes. The way the Idols are these larger-than-life manifestations of music stars is extremely cool.

Conceptually, Dead as Disco has so much going for it in these early stages. After you beat each Idol, a small skill tree opens up that grants a special skill and useful upgrades for the player. Right now, the list of moves available is kind of small but still solid. Most players are going to find climbing the leaderboard and creating custom challenges as a continued incentive to keep playing. So yeah, the game definitely embraces its Early Access period.

But I think this unique delivery method of fighting has extensive legs to it. We are undoubtedly going to see some extremely smooth and flashy combat from the best players who squeeze out every note of skill. And by being released in this way, Brain Jar Games can work with its community to make the final product even better.

I think it would be a bit disingenuous to slap a score onto Dead as Disco as an Early Access title. I’m judging the foundation of a product that will be vastly different and improved months down the line. If what you’ve seen or what I’ve talked about sounds appealing, give it a try! However, trying to pass some kind of binary judgement feels too final for how early of a look this is for a game that obviously has a good amount of growing to do.

Dead as Disco has a distinct vision for what it wants to be and ultimately, it’s a wildly entertaining first step. Early Access is the perfect opportunity for Brain Jar Games to release its rhythm-based beat ’em up into the wild and work with players while they take this concept to its current limits. As engaging as most of its Idol fights are right now, the true gem of Dead as Disco is going to be its custom mode where players fight to the beat of their own music. Ripe for content, I think this one may turn out to be a hit.