The new animated series from the creators of Love, Death + Robots is, I suppose unsurprisingly, an infuriating mess and generally a huge waste of time. Coming in hot at the end of the year, Amazon Prime’s Secret Level is one of the worst new TV shows of 2024. Judging whether it will turn out to be the worst show of the year perhaps requires waiting another week for the rest of the episodes to stream. At this moment, it has my vote for that.
Unlike Love, Death + Robots, Secret Level doesn’t even offer the relief of a couple decent episodes mixed in among all the crappy ones. At least, it hasn’t yet. Of the eight episodes to launch with the premiere this week, not a single one has a remotely interesting story, and the only memorable character is the big moron who annoyingly repeats his name over and over again to everyone around him.
| Title: | Secret Level |
| Season: | 1 |
| Premiere Episodes: | 1.01 – Dungeons & Dragons: The Queen’s Cradle 1.02 – Sifu: It Takes a Life 1.03 – New World: The Once and Future King 1.04 – Unreal Tournament: Xan 1.05 – Warhammer 40,000: And They Shall Know No Fear 1.06 – PAC-MAN: Circle 1.07 – Crossfire: Good Conflict 1.08 – Armored Core: Asset Management |
| Total Episodes in Season: | 15 |
| Premiere Date: | December 10, 2024 |
| Watched On: | Amazon Prime Video |
In the three seasons that have streamed on Netflix to date, Love, Death + Robots has been an anthology series comprised of multiple short episodes, all delivered by separate writing and animation teams, typically in styles very different from one another. Despite the move to Amazon, Secret Level is, effectively, just a new season of that – with the particular theme this year that all the episodes are based on or inspired by real video games. Some of the franchises represented are quite famous (Dungeons & Dragons, Unreal Tournament, Warhammer), while a few of them I’d never heard of. (Admittedly, I don’t pretend to be a hardcore gamer.) Apparently, one of the remaining episodes coming in the second half of the season is based on a game that failed so spectacularly it was pulled offline just two weeks after release.
Both shows are basically excuses for animators to push the boundaries of their medium with highly-detailed, at times near-photorealistic animation that nonetheless often manifests a troubling Uncanny Valley effect. Sadly, not nearly as much effort has been put into the writing side of the creative process, and most episodes are terribly written, with dumb and incoherent stories. Pretty much the only good episodes of Love, Death + Robots were the handful based on comedic sci-fi short stories by Old Man’s War author John Scalzi, with the rest a bunch of stupid garbage.
Anthology shows tend to be very hit-or-miss by nature. The first eight episodes of Secret Level are entirely misses. Ranging in length from ten to twenty minutes, most of them play like cut-scenes taken from somewhere in the middle of a video game, lacking either proper introduction or conclusion. The opening Dungeons & Dragons story features a group of generic dwarf and wizard characters fighting off monsters. They seek the help of a good dragon, who somehow turns into an evil dragon, and the episode ends on a cliffhanger with them getting ready to fight again. That’s it. There’s nothing more to it, and that’s some of the best storytelling this show has to offer.
Other episodes are comprised of little more than random fighting and shooting and screaming and swearing and exceedingly bloody violence that would earn a hard “T for Teen” game rating. Some of them have celebrity voice actors – Keanu Reeves piloting a flying mech suit in Armored Core, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as a warrior-king in New World, being the most recognizable.
The Schwarzenegger episode is mildly amusing, and may be the best of this sad lot. The character he plays is a total dipshit who believes himself a conquering hero, but repeatedly gets his ass kicked by everyone he fights. The episode even has something resembling a character arc in which he has to learn the value of friendship. Even so, the joke wears thin long before its fifteen minutes run out.
By far the worst episode is the one supposedly based on Pac-Man, which in absolutely no way resembles the iconic game. For one thing, the character is depicted as a noseless humanoid lizard-man who looks like Voldemort wearing a green cloak. Don’t even ask why. I have no idea. The episode is disturbing and gruesome nonsense cooked up by some edgelord moron who undoubtedly believes every innocuous children’s property would be improved with a dark and gritty reboot.
I couldn’t tell you the name of a single character in any of the other episodes. Crossfire is about two rival groups of soldiers shooting and sniping one another, and while watching it I couldn’t figure out which soldiers were supposed to be the good ones to root for and which were the bad ones.
All the episodes are pointless, dumb, and tedious, with unlikable characters and confusing plots. If the season is going to have any halfway watchable episodes (something I’m skeptical of at this point), Amazon made a huge mistake in holding them back to the second week. If, on the other hand, the show was actually front-loaded with all its best episodes in the premiere… well, as the Keanu Reeves character so eloquently articulates in his episode’s truly sterling dialogue: “Fuck these guys.”
Video Streaming
The first eight episodes of Secret Level debuted on Amazon Prime Video this Tuesday, December 10, 2024. The remaining seven will run next Tuesday, the 17th. Technically, the show streams in 4K HDR, though I expect that the animation was probably upscaled from 1080p or less. I noted edge shimmering in a few of the episodes, but I’m not sure if that’s a scaling artifact or a digital compression problem.
All episodes (so far) have a consistent 2.00:1 aspect ratio. The image is generally pretty sharp, but the animation in a couple of the episodes is softened for what appears to be purposeful effect. The HDR grading also runs very dark on many of them, especially the Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer episodes. That said, the Warhammer episode at least has some nice popping highlights and colors during laser blasts and explosions.
The Dolby Atmos soundtrack features thumping bass in the opening theme music and occasional moments of intense LFE rumble. Surround use is also very aggressive, with bullets and lasers and other sound effects coming from every direction during the action scenes. However, dialogue is often quite dull and suppressed in the mix. The Sifu episode is the worst in that respect. Lip sync with the animation is also erratic.
Amazon offers a variety of foreign language dub options should anyone desire them, but I noted a lack of Japanese, which might have helped that Sifu episode (set in Tokyo) play better.
Related
- Pac-Man
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Keanu Reeves
The Video File Blog 
Credit where it’s due, episodes in the second half of the season are substantially better than those in the first. While not all of them are great, and story coherency is still a major problem for some of them (especially the last two: Honor of Kings and Playtime), none of them are as brutally unwatchable as the first eight. The Exodus episode is actually quite good, and most of the others are at least interesting, even when they don’t make sense.
I still think it was a huge blunder for Amazon to front-load the season with all the worst episodes in the premiere. Who the hell made that stupid decision?
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