Let's Talk... Dark

Vampires and stealth go together brilliantly on paper, the idea of skulking around in the shadows feeding off the blood of those pathetic mortals could make a really great game. It’s just a shame that Dark is about as interesting as it’s title, and makes blood sucking a boring chore. Dark has some nice ideas and potentially fun gameplay, but the endless bugs, horribly bad AI, and animations that look like they were made by a four year old make the execution of this concept extremely messy. Dark is not just a terrible stealth game but is also a completely uninspired story. So much of Dark is terribly executed that it’s difficult to find what’s the most infuriating. From the extremely dull characters to some of the laughably bad animations, Dark seems like something that a High School student lazily put together the night before it was due.

The cliché-ridden story follows Eric Bane (really?), a newly turned vampire suffering from amnesia who must drink the blood of the vampire that turned him in order to avoid being turned into a mindless ghoul (frankly, it seems a little late for that). Despite there being little-to-no character building for Eric or any of the other boring characters, there’s more than enough to see that everybody is just a monotonous drone. You can get some context of the world with the very Mass Effect-esque conversation wheel, but chat options are limited and the answers you get are often pointlessly vague or just purely contradicting (for example, one of the “head” vampires will tell you that there is no vampire society and then follow it up by saying “I wouldn’t expect a half-blood to understand” …What?). Dark fails to deliver anything new to vampire fiction and many ideas are clearly ripped off more successful vampire fiction, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Dracula.

Level design can sometimes be colourful, but is generally quite boring and feels unfair

Stealth is the name of game, but the stealth is skewered to the point where it more accurately resembles a mushy mess. You are given a small handful of abilities to unlock and upgrade through experience, such as a short range teleport blink (ripped straight out of Dishonored), and the ability to instant kill guards when you have the “blood” (similar to Deus Ex’s energy system that allowed you perform takedowns but required energy). Every ability can be upgraded a couple of times each, but the upgrades are incredibly boring and pretty much just make your abilities quieter, or just reduces its cooldown. You require “blood” to perform these abilities, which is acquired by performing a noisy blood-sucking takedown that takes forever. Whilst it may sound like your average upgrade system for a game with some crammed in RPG elements, but there’s some serious imbalance in the cost and effect of some skills. For example, it costs the same amount of blood to distract a guard than it does to kill a guard, which certainly makes distracting them seem pretty useless. On top of that, your abilities are underwhelming and have some terrible animations. Like really terrible.

The AI are laughably bad for the most part

Dark’s gameplay would be frustrating enough with just that, but the horrible AI and unfair level design make this game incredibly painful to play. The AI tends to have unpredictably good vision, but their behaviour is so stupid that it makes avoiding detection far too easy. Once they spot you, guards will endlessly shoot where you last were (kind of like the way guards in Splinter Cell: Conviction would, only they are must less intelligent about it) and statically stare exactly where they saw you, allowing you easily shadow leap away and take the dumb guards out from behind. Laughably bad AI would be bad enough without the level design being so unfair; the levels will regularly dump you into a brightly lit room with 20+ guards and expects you to complete the level with nothing but relentless trial and error. The level design is also boring, repetitive, and uninspired.

However, Dark does do a pretty good job of conveying the dark, gritty world of a pledging vampire with its cel shaded aesthetic that looks heavily inspired by The Darkness 2’s very cartoon-like appearance and overuse of purple colours. Whilst the cel shaded effects feel appropriate, they don’t make up for the world being bland and darn ugly. The world is sometimes a little too dark, making it difficult to tell when you’re visible and thankfully hiding the visually world. Sound design is about as below average as everything else in this title, voice acting isn’t that bad but every character seems to share the same level of utterly apathetic monotone (especially Eric). Guns sound really wrong, punching guards sounds flat and unsatisfying, and more than one occasion the sound just abruptly cut out for no apparent reason.

Dark has an appropriate cel shaded look

 The few neat ideas Dark has to offer are all completely shunted by their poor execution. This 5 hour mess fails to deliver on what it tries to offer, and there are more than enough reasons to completely avoid this title. Fans of either stealth games or vampire fiction will be nothing but disappointed here.

Strengths:

       -Cel shaded visuals capture the tone of the game quite well

       -Having to perform special takedowns to power your skills makes your abilities

       feel more valuable and makes the game feel tense at times

Weaknesses:

       - Some good concepts that are let down by their flawed execution

       -Stealth is ruined by the horrifyingly bad AI

       -Level design pushes you towards trial and error rather than genuine success

       -Upgrade tree and skills are basic and pretty boring

       -Full of visual bugs and audio bugs

       -Voice acting is unbearably monotone

       -Characters are dull and character development is very limited

       -Clunky and laughably bad animations

       -No original ideas, most gameplay elements have been ripped from some other

       Title (i.e. Shadow leap is a much less fun version of Blink from Dishonored
       -$50 for 5 hour long story