Last updated on January 4th, 2026 at 12:44 pm
Dead Cells – Action Game Review
Dead Cells is a Action/Roleplaying game from Playdigious, first launched in 17th July 2019.
It’s rated 12+ and currently has 11,505+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Dead Cells Stand Out
Death is not the end.
Play as a failed alchemic experiment and explore the sprawling, ever-changing castle to find out what happened on this gloomy island…!
That is, assuming you’re able to fight your way past its keepers.
Dead Cells is a roguevania action platformer that will require you to master frantic 2D combat with a wide variety of weapons and skills against merciless minions and boss.
Kill. Die. Learn. Repeat.
First available on PC and consoles, the indie hit Dead Cells is now slaying foes on mobile!
Main Features
• Roguevania: The progressive exploration of an interconnected world, with the replayability of a rogue-lite and the adrenaline-pumping threat of permadeath
• Frantic and Dynamic 2D Action: Learn your enemies’ patterns to stay alive, or prepare to be sent back to your cell before you can say “baguette”
• Nonlinear Progression: Unlock new levels with every death, opt for the path that suits your current build, your playstyle or just your mood.
Surely, the ramparts can’t be as bad as the sewers, right?
• Play at your own pace: Will you explore every nook and cranny of the castle, or rush to the end?
Latest updates are available: Clean Cut & The End is Near
RETURN TO CASTLEVANIA DLC
Time for some vampire slaying
• New storyline – overcome the Ruler of Darkness alongside Alucard and Richter Belmont,
• 2 new biomes – Explore Dracula's Castle and its outskirts
• 9 new monsters – Werewolves, haunted armors, and medusas are waiting for you
• 14 new weapons – wield the Vampire Killer or the Holy Water to defeat creatures of the night,
• 3 new bosses – go fangs to fangs against Death and Dracula himself
• 20 new outfits – dress as your favorite Castlevania characters such as Simon and Richter Belmont or Alucard
• Alternative soundtracks – play along 51 Castlevania original tracks and 12 tunes reimagined in the style of Dead Cells
THE BAD SEED DLC
You reap what you sow
• New levels to lose your head in the not-so-peaceful Dilapidated Arboretum and the noxious Morass of the Banished
• New monsters to rip to pieces: get to know the locals, such as the Jerkshroom and the Yeeter
• New weapons to play with: trim sticking-out heads with the Scythe Claw, or make them dance to the sound of the Rhythm n' Bouzouki
• New boss to fight against: Mama Tick is dying to meet you
FATAL FALLS DLC
Ready for a leap of faith?
• 3 new biomes – Get some fresh air at the Fractured Shrines, splash around at the Undying Shores and take a picture at the Mausoleum
• 8 new monsters – The Cold Blooded Guardians and their friends would love to teach you about their culture. … Wait, aren't those relatives of yours in the Undying Shores…?
• 7 new weapons – Lil' Serenade is perfect for breaking the ice with the locals, although the Snake Fangs would make for a perfect souvenir…
• 1 new boss – The Scarecrow is very proud of his gardening skills and won't hesitate to show off
QUEEN AND THE SEA DLC
Take it to the sea!
• 2 new biomes – Battle your way through a rotten shipwreck, or scale a burning lighthouse and confront your deadliest foe yet.
• 9 new weapons, including a throwable shark, a trident and a pirate hook hand (eyepatch not included).
• 2 new bosses – Don't lose your head before you meet the Queen!
This DLC also gives you the usual extras:
- A not-so-cute pet.
- Loads of new outfits.
- New enemies to bash.
WARNING: Devices with less than 2 Gb of RAM may not be able to run this content correctly. We recommend not to take this DLC if your device is under 2gb of RAM.
Carefully redesigned for mobile with a revamped interface
• Two game modes available: Original & Auto-Hit
• Custom controls & More touch controls options available: Change the buttons’ position and size to your liking, swipe to dodge…
• MFi external controller support
• No ads, no F2P mechanics!
If you run into a problem, please contact us at [email protected]
with as much information as possible on the issue.
This Action game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Dead Cells is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 5th December 2025
Recent improvements include:
- Fixing crashes after beating Hand of the King and during Queen fight
- Fixing some interface issues
- Improving input detection
- Fixing some localization issues
- Fixing miscellaneous minor issues
Download & Availability
Dead Cells is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Ive enjoyed this game since we came out on iOS never beat it but put a unhealthy amount of time Ive lost iOS accounts and bought the game again we think Ive bought 3/4 copys now.
We recently beat the collector and got the true ending. Its a beautiful game. You need to play it.
Its kind of hard to explain why we love Dead Cells so much. On the surface, its just another action game where you fight enemies, die, and start over. But for us, its become something way more than that. Its one of those games that keeps pulling you back in no matter how many times you lose. Somehow, every failure makes us want to try again instead of quit, and we think thats what makes it special. When we first started playing, we were terrible at it. Id barely make it past the first area before dying in some stupid way rolling into spikes, missing a dodge, or just panicking when too many enemies showed up. At first it was frustrating. But over time, we realized that every time we died, we learned something new. Id remember an enemys attack pattern, or figure out which weapons worked best for us. Its like the game was training us without actually telling us what to do. Slowly, we started lasting longer each run, and that feeling of getting better not because the game got easier, but because we improved was honestly amazing. What we love most about Dead Cells is how smooth and satisfying the gameplay feels. When everything clicks when Im dodging perfectly, landing every hit, and moving through the level without getting touched it feels incredible. The combat feels fast and responsive, like Im in complete control. Its almost like a rhythm game sometimes, where Im just flowing from one move to the next. Even after dozens of hours, it still feels exciting when we pull off a perfect fight. The world of Dead Cells is also really cool. It doesnt tell its story directly, but you can piece things together through the environment. Theres this mix of beauty and decay bright colors and eerie silence that gives the game a weird, lonely atmosphere. Even though our character doesnt speak, it still feels like theres a deeper story going on underneath everything. We find ourselves wondering what happened to this place and why we keep coming back to life after every death. Its mysterious in a way that makes us want to keep exploring. But honestly, the main reason we love Dead Cells is because of what it taught us. The game is hard, and it doesnt hold your hand. You fail over and over again, but if you stick with it, you get better. It reminded us that progress doesnt always come quickly sometimes you have to fall a bunch of times before you get it right. That idea has kind of stuck with us outside of gaming too. Whenever we mess up at something in real life, we think about how we handled it in Dead Cells: take a breath, learn from it, and try again. To us, Dead Cells isnt just a game about fighting monsters. Its about patience, persistence, and improvement. It shows that failure isnt the end its just part of getting better. And thats why we love it. No matter how many times we die, we always want to get back up and give it one more try.
On our first day playing this game we played 3+ hrs in one sitting. Our only complaint is that the controls can be a lil bit annoying to use but all in all its 10/10 game.
The game is identical to the console version but it might be better because you can take it with you.
This is our favorite game and we enjoy it every single time we play it. Is hard to win and requires time if youre a beginner.
Only game we play on our Apple TV, but this is the third time Ive lost all our progress when playing on TVOS. Extremely frustrating, we guess it was fun while it lasted.
Stellar game, absolute masterpiece, if you purchase games worth every penny, all the DLCs are worth it too.. It keeps getting better and better, a different play though every time.. 150 out of 100, gets very difficult in later stages but the weaponry evens the playing field.
Fantastic game. We have it on the Xbox too so we can play even more of it. You can really feel the progression when youre playing. Primary example being the boss cell doors, good stuff.
This game is so addictive. You die and want MORE AND MORE each time you play. A true classic game with a hint of comedy.
10/10 best game it should be game o the 10 year.
We are love dead sells. Itsso epic.
We can easily quite and continue playing the game without worrying restarting a stage over and over again. This is why we love Dead Cells much more than SOR4 and TMNT, even though the other 2 are also very good. Already owned all DLCs on PC and SWITCH, hope iOS DLCs can be on sale soon.
We have 1.3k hours so id think its pretty good.
Just like solo leveling and every other Isekai we love it.
We like it we love it but we keep getting null access.
Fun and tough roguelile game Btw addictional content cost 4 bucks for 1 xtremely cheap and all together 20$ and we love it Great game for kids.
Honestly this game is the definition of peak in the rogue like space from its smooth and fluid game mechanics to the level design and lore this game excels in almost all categories.
Ive been waiting to write this review until we actually beat the game. And so now that Ive beaten the game we wanted to come back and give a review of it. First of all we just wanna say how much fun we have had playing this game Im normally pretty Cautious when it comes to playing games that are rogue light Ive had some experiences that havent been great. This game felt difficult enough to be challenging and involving while not feeling as though the developers had a personal vendetta against us. We love having choice and this game presents a lot of choices in terms of gameplay and build for the character. Hats off to the developers. We havent gotten bored yet and there is plenty more content to go through even after your first run through.
Dead cells. Where do we begin? This game has everything you could ask for in a rougelike. Its challenging, the item/weapon selection is enormous, and the amount of replayability that this game has is outstanding. We recently got the game on our PC, and was instantly hooked. As soon as we found out that this mobile version of the game existed, we bought it without hesitation. The controls in the mobile version are really smooth, and extremely similar to its PC counterpart. The only complaint we really have is that the buttons are a bit small, and we sometime miss attacks because of it, but its no big deal. We highly recommend this game to anyone who wants a good challenge, and a game that they can play for hours in a day with each replay being different from the last.
Had it on Xbox and just bought it a week ago and we love it.
- We would like a pad instead of wheel for movement. 2. Swipe up to jump and swipe down to drop/slam. Gameplay would be much smoother. Thank you very fun game.
We love the game and we love the gameplay but we been having problems with the audio of the game, the problem is that there is audio delay and we thought it was because of problems with our previous phone we got a new one recently specially the iPhone 16 and we thought the problems with the audio will be gone but we keep having problems with it, please let us know a way to fix this.
The game is fantastic, but when our phone is on vibrate, all audio is cutoff regardless of the main volume slider in iOS. Doesn't make much sense. Our rating is purely for the port, the game itself is fantastic.
It reminds us of the day we first played this game years ago and yet the write a review thing came out today.
Npc character avatars visually glitching after obtaining 5 cells. Tried hard reinstall. No joy.
Game is amazing but the mechanics have definitely gotten more slower after the most recent update. Gameplay in general has gotten slower but the enemies remain the same speed.
We payed for return to castlevania but it didnt give us the DLC for it.
We have this game on console, and it is a difficult but fun game. Playing on the phone takes away your ability to do anything accurately. We die more to the digital controls than anything else. Save your money and buy it on a system with a controller.
We now understand that the point of the game is to restart completely every time you die. We still whole-heartedly believe thats something you should make very clear in the game description on the AppStore. We went on Reddit and found many people like us who wasted money on this game, because they had no clue it was that kind of game. Kill. Die. Learn. Repeat is 100% not enough of a warning that you will lose ALL progress after dying.
Five stars no explanation needed.
Poorly made game with unrealistic hit boxes.
Game runs smooth on SE 3rd Gen. Cant wait to see the improvements of the 4th.
Now we know why they call this one of the great metroidvanias of all time. Have already completed one run through and looking forward to embarking another. Richly layered. High replay value. Love it.
This game changed our life. Gave us something better to do than heroin.
We play this game so much and still find out new features and cells. We Strongly recommend to play this game. Theres some controlling issues that we recommend to developers to fix it specially in mobile movement controls. But in total Im a big fan.
We usually dont do reviews but this game is spectacular! We dont think Ive sat on our phone for a game longer than we have for this one! Definitely have fun playing even when we die. We would definitely recommend buying this game. You get your moneys worth with the amount of time and experience you get out of this game.
We love it the art we have never played a 3d pixel game most off them are 2d but this this is amazing great art love Mona Lisa.
Idk what to put here but it's fun.
We own it on steam and mobile and its just a great game. Almost identical in every way to the PC version but maybe 1-2 updates behind.
Great lore, expansive gameplay and over all a great experience and we havent even played the dlcs.
We usually think action games like this on mobile are terrible, but with the ability to turn on auto attack and adjust some settings in assist mode to make minor control mistakes less punishing, this has become our fav game to play while out n about. They killed it here.
Im not a fan of rouge-lites, yet this one is something special.
Like a really effective port. Honestly cant imagine not playing this game on our phone when Im on the go.
We are in love with the gameplay and the controls are easy while adjustable! We couldnt ask for more.
So this game is like 7$ and 18-35$ on every other platform. Its fun to play and highly addicting like eating flaming hot Cheetos you cant put it down even if your losing! One star off just because theres sometimes not enough room for the button layout even customized. If you pairs a controller or played on a tablet it could be a solid mobile game.
Sin palabras para describir tal acto de perfeccin.
This is one of the greatest games Ive ever played, the action, the mechanics, 10/10 would recommend.
Love this game takes us back to the Mega man days. The OG days of real video games playing weee it wasnt give it was taken with hard replays and time.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 3.5.9
- Size: 1,818.32 MB
- iOS: 12.0 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE, IT, JA, KO, PL, PT, RU, ES, ZH, TR
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor, Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: Playdigious
Last updated: 5th December 2025 | Genre: Action, Roleplaying | Developer: Playdigious