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I remember a time when vampires were awesome Bad *** Blood Sucking Monstrosities. And when
I grew up I loved them, Not in an I'm going to grow out my fringe and wear my mothers
makeup kind of way. But In an it would be awesome to be a bad *** mother trucker kind
of way.
So what happened to vampires along the way? Yes they used to have the odd forbidden love
story but in recent years it appears all vampires stories are either a metaphor for latent homosexuality
and the authors *** for another mans fluids or about pasty upper-class white boys who
talk about their feelings whilst they grimace and fart out glitter for swooning pre-pubescent
girls.
Thankfully not everyone agrees with this change and to show this here we have a videogame
that had a lot of hype a while back forĀ¬ being a badass. Dark for PC and Xbox 360.
Initially the game throws you into a Nightclub were you are tripping out off one too many
tabs of acid an once having a conversation with an angelic creature and throw water over
your face you come down from your trip and start investigating into who the hell you
are what your doing.
This is a brilliant introduction to the game, you walk around for 20 minutes in a club going
back and forth listening to some badly animated and badly acted conversations.
This section of any games is supposed to wow the consumer But this grips the gamer as much
as a documentary involving the political and economical growth of used toilet paper.
Anyway, You find out that your name is Eric Bane a newly formed vampire that resembles
Mass Effects Commander Shepard
if he instead of going off to save the galaxy found a comfortable dumpster to hide behind
with nothing in his possession but a lighter and some Chrystal ***.
I assure you this is fitting analogy as the games conversation system also resembles Mass
Effects way of involving the gamer buy making them choose what questions to ask in which
order, though in dark it dosen't matter what questions you prioritise as the game allows
you to listen to everything people have to say without with out worrying about the alternative
outcomes of each conversation.
Eventually we find out that Eric is a new vampire and needs the blood of his creator
to become a fully-fledged vampire or suffer becoming a ghoul, and without asking any more
off he sets out to kill butcher and massacre all that stand in the way of him completing
this act.
The game controls are a bit sloppy, it took a long while for me to get used to them because
it all felt like trying to parallel park a buss with no reverse gear. And the camera
control felt like Junkie Shepard was vigorously swatting at imaginary flies.
The combat in the game is simple enough as each enemy is a one shot kill as far as I'm
concerned but with the limited use of vampire abilities the combat just felt slow and sluggish
until I had gained enough experience to amp up some abilities. It was now that I felt
like a real harbinger of death, lurking in the shadows and springing around corners at
the last minute or shadow leaping across the room in order to better slay my victims.
The problem with this development is that it happens rather late in the game and it
took me a good while to not hate Dark for its many flaws. One of the biggest flaws I
found were the checkpoint system were after spending a good half an hour in a room taking
out enemies and sneaking my way through, I would get discovered shot to death and have
to restart the entire process again.
Which reminds me, this is a cover based stealth game in which you can jump over cover, You
shadow abilities are as temperamental as foreign policy and the story has as much bravado as
a humble kitchen sponge and yet I find myself loving this game. Once you get over the flaws
in the movement and combat you learn to act around them. Yes it would have been nice to
have a more effective shadow Leap ability at the beginning of the game to make it fun,
though towards the end of the game I honestly felt although I had achieved something when
I became the blade style badass.
I think this game is on the right tracks though as it stands it doesn't feel like a finished
game. Maybe Dark should have taken a leaf from the recent Batman Arkham games and made
moving in the shadows a more enjoyable experience from the beginning. I honestly cant describe
enough how the beginning of the game felt and so I will let this guy show you through
the means of interoperate dance...
Ahha... really.... Oh god.
The initial look of the game is pretty, with the comic book cell shaded look that we are
seeing more of in the recent years however the animations of the characters is very wooden.
Characters randomly stop doing what they are doing and stand in a default position only
to resume it again milliseconds later.
The game is ridiculously short. If I hadn't died endless amounts of times due to bad game
mechanics and random glitches I would probably have completed the game within 5 or 6 hours
which isn't short on Bioshock standards but this isn't a game to bioshocks standards and
I feel like it could have been a massive title bringing a close to the current generation
but someware along the lines Dark decided that it had no clue what kind of a game it
was and decided to end it all before it had even started.