Secret Level

I don't know how they managed to separate the first season into 2 complete separate quality parts. First was pretty good, I would rate it a solid 8, especially the Warhammer 40k episode, that was a 10.

And now we get to the second part, every episode was bad and mediocre. I had to skip the Concorde one, irritating, the last was so cringe that had to skip again. The only watchable episode was the Exodus one. Meh, what a letdown. Finish a season on the lowest quality episode.

I had to change my initial 8 score to 6, and that is even gracious. Do better for season 2!

I had to change my initial 8 score to 6, and that is even gracious. Do better for season 2!

Short stories within the setting of video games. Or very loosely based on the setting of the games. Very different games, ranging from Pac-Man to Warhammer 40.000. Even Concord, where I assume the creators have been cursing themselves when seeing what that game ended up being.

It's mainly meh stories about mostly mediocre-at-best games I often have hardly even heard about. The visuals are great though. But except for one or two out outliers there is little substance. I am sure the cutscenes for most of those game were better. Let's not compare this to anthology shows like Black Mirror or Love Death and Robots.

Still. It's made by people that seem to be gamers.

You will get entertained here. Some episodes are good, some are great, some are just incredible. You need to make that decision for yourself. For me, 1.5 "You Shall know no fear" is the best of the bunch, but 1.5 is the best animation of Warhammer history and it does everything right. My god, it was unbelievably good. That said, there is no reason to read my review, go watch the episodes instead and choose your best one.

I knew that the creators of love death and robots knew how to nail animated short stories, but this simply is amazing. We need more of it.

And we simply require more of the Warhammer Universe. Exactly! As shown here.

A lot of wasted potential, that's how I would define what happened with "Secret Level", I could also say that it was "Love, death and Robots" but bad.

This Amazon bet, which although it turned out fantastic (record viewing and confirmed a second season), did not seem to me to have lived up to expectations.

It bets only on one type of animation, it hardly experiments and we are only left with hyperrealism, which although it works for some chapters, it is not the solution to everything. Although the comparison with the Netflix series can be annoying, I think it is a great point of support when we evaluate "Secret Level" in general.

Another thing that was not right was dividing the episodes into two batches, with a first part that is far superior to the second in terms of quality and variety. Ending with a totally malicious Play Station advertisement.

When one thinks about the possibilities, the limits are infinite, however, in practice, only 4-5 chapters are rescued at most. Warhammer 40000 is the best episode without a doubt and I suppose I breathe a sigh of relief thinking about the series that Henry Cavill will star in in the future. It looks great, it's impressive, just a few minutes are enough to be inside the franchise.

Unreal Tournament was another episode that I liked, in that fight of the machines for survival against the corporation that wants to destroy them. It gives a little more in terms of the philosophical concept of the machines and their feeling.

The Pac-Man episode, although predictable, I also liked, it experiments with animation and is extremely dark, one of the few in that sense.

Honor of Kings, which has nothing to do with the LOL plagiarism game but has a very interesting background and concept. At the same time, it is the only episode of the second batch that is very good.

I hope that the next season is much better than this one and that great intellectual properties are included and that classics like Megaman are respected, which was a shame here.

A couple of cool episodes aside, Secret Level feels like a monument to mediocrity. The writing is painfully mid, dragging the whole show down despite the undeniably impressive visuals-though even those feel like reheated leftovers from a decade of superior video game cinematics. Honestly, what is this show trying to do or say that hasn't been done (and done better) by video game marketing in the past 10+ years?

The lineup of titles is baffling. Where are the big names? The absence of heavy hitters screams one thing: developers wanted no part of this trainwreck or were waiting to see if Season 1 could stick the landing. Spoiler alert-it didn't.

Short-form storytelling seems to completely elude the creators. What should have been tight, impactful, and memorable comes across as disjointed and uninspired. Variety called it an "uninspired snooze," and for once, Variety wasn't being harsh enough.

Secret Level is proof that flashy visuals can't hide a lack of vision, heart, or originality!