評論

• gamedeal user

  Jun 28, 2014

  Let me just start out by saying that I have a very high tolerance for pain when it comes to bad entertainment. I enjoy bad B and Z movies like Slugs and anything on the SYFY channel. The very first computer games I owned were Phantasmagoria 1 & 2. I love it, no I live for it. I have bad taste and make no apologies for it. So when I saw that Dark was on sale for a little over 7 dollars I thought to myself "How bad can it be, it's only 7 dollars." How wrong I was. It would have been less of a waste of money if I went out and bought a Mc rib, and less shit too. I still can't believe that the makers of Tropico published this. Eric Bane starts the game by doing what he does best, never shutting up. Going on and on in his Rorschach like repetitive inner monologue that can be boiled down to "I can't believe this, Is this really happening, Is this true?" He finds out that he is a vampire with supper Nightcrawler powers the are kind of neat once you learn how to use them. But wait he's not a real vampire he's a half vampire, because he was drained of blood and didn't get blood form the one that made him. Also if he doesn't get this blood he will become an animal and have to be killed, but if he drinks the blood of an ancient vampire he will be fine. So vampires are made when a human has all of their blood drained? Then how are the vampires a secret? There must be thousands of these ghouls as they call them running a round, because they can only drink human blood. Are you telling me that all these years no vampire slipped up and drained a human while feeding? It's ok, because Rose, who wears lights in her hair for awesome fashion taste, tells me that she knows of an ancient vampire that runs the museum. He is decades old. DECADES OLD! I'm decades old, my dad is decades old, my grandma I guess would be supper ancient because she is going to be 100 this year. We also find out that becoming a vampire conveniently erases all memories of you pass. How all vampires aren't drooling idiots is anyone's guess. Eric then goes to talk to the other vampire whose name I have already forgotten, all I remember is that his accent was kind of like, sort of, maybe European, or Californian? I couldn't tell. It' bugged me. Mr. I don't know what kind of white person I want to be shows me how to use my powers by asking me to take care of a gang that is bothering the club members. This is a gang of old men bums. They stand around barrels with fire on them to keep warm with guns and mug people. So it was here that I learned how to use my powers and how to feed off of people, and that this is a stealth game and if I do not stealth really good I will get killed. Because everyone has guns in this world even the bums, I'm sorry GANG! It's really easy to miss or mess up a stealth kill and get everyone with in 5 miles to come kill you. I did kind of like the ideas of the powers a bit, but from what I could see only 2 or 3 of them would really be useful in the end so no need for a replay to try out other powers. Not that I would ever what a replay. Yes the powers are kind of neat and I would have kept playing if not for the bad story and game play. Finding out how to drag a corpses was a pain. I guess Agent 47 is more of a vampire then Eric, because he can pick up bodies with ease, carry them, and put them in places where they can not be found. Eric on the other had has to be pushed form 3rd person view to 3rd person and drag the body to a place like behind a box. You can do this one of two ways facing to body to make sure that it doesn't get stuck on anything but risk getting stuck yourself, or with you back to the body so you can see where you are going risking having the body get stuck on something and spazzing out flopping around making nose that WILL alert anyone near by so they can come and shoot you. One thing I really hated in the tutorial was that while I was sneaking about I would suddenly have control taken from me and put where they wanted me to get the tutorial moving with out any warning. This was really bad with the healing part. Not just in how it was done, but also in how it looked. I was sneaking about when I am suddenly pulled with my back to the wall so I can peaked around it. A gang bum sees me and starts to shoot at me. It looks like me misses not because I see his bullets miss but because Eric didn't react at all. Then Eric rolls to behind a box and I am told I am hurt and need to heal. So I guess that all those bullets did hit Eric but he was to busy with his inner monologue to notice that he had been shot. Like I said before I like bad games. I'm not one to really rag on things like graphics and what not. If the game play or story are good I'll let it slide. Too bad Dark didn't have any thing good in it to distract me from the fact that everyone talks like they have their teeth wired shut. Even with that the lip movement didn't come close to matching what was being said. The camera had a bad habit of cutting to a new angle after every new line of badly voiced and written dialog sometimes jerking about in such a way that I didn't know what was going on. It gave me a headache talking to people and I don't know if it was the bad writing, the cheesy voice acting, or the spazzy camera work. Nothing about anything people do in this game feels natural or smooth. People stand in unnatural poses talking to you with mouth movements like they had just gotten back form the dentist and had teeth pulled, while their lips flap around in a way that would suggest they want to kiss you but chicken out at the last minute. Eric stands there with his fingers clawed and walks around like a gorilla on two legs. I don't know if his forearm is too long or if his elbow is broken because when he bends it it stick out a little to far. THIS GAME WAS MADE IN 2012! I have games that are almost a decade old that look more natural! After what felt like forever I was suddenly warped to museum. The pacing in this game is schizophrenic. Too slow then too fast with no build up. Eric started to monolog and then he was talking on the radio to Rose. I could not tell where the monolog ended and the conversation started. I turned off the game, and thought about how I had wasted 7 dollars and what I could have bought that would have been better. After a bit of reflection I uninstalled the game and went to play Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 27, 2014

  The idea is decent but the story itself is just horrible. Every few feet, there's a new monotone narration that has no reason for being there at all. Every voice actor sounds bored or tired, and the dialogue alternates between pointless and cliche. And there's a lot of dialogue. Or maybe it's so bad it just feels like a lot. The controls handle okay and some of the powers are pretty great, but it's all dragged down whenever anyone's lips start flapping like a bad anime dub. You end up rolling your eyes at most of the characters just because what they say, and how, is so ridiculous. Stay away from this one. Save your money. Unless you want a great example of okay gameplay dragged down by dreadful writing.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 12, 2014

  I wanted to like this game. I wanted to recommend it. I really did... but I can't. I just can't. When I first heard about DARK, prior to it's release, I was extremely excited. It was a promising concept... a vampire game that focused more on stealth than outright combat, but alas, it was not meant to be. DARK is a short, clunky trek through 6 chapters of repetition. It took me about 12 hours to complete the game my first time through (which I did on Hard), but I took my time through the chapters trying to kill every enemy, and left the game sitting paused several times, so my real time was probably closer to 10 hours or so. Again, that's my first playthrough, and on Hard, so make of that what you will. The game is exclusively single-player, and there's really no incentive whatsoever to play through the game a second time as there are no branching paths or decisions, and the individual "challenges" accessible from the main menu are pointless unless you're interested in leaderboards. The game features no real combat system. It's allllllllll stealth and stealth kills, unless you use your vampiric powers, but those are intended to be used from stealth as well. Speaking of powers, while they're fun to use for a while, they're largely irrelevant. You could make it through the game fairly easily without using any of them. When you do use them, they're incredibly powerful when maxed out (which can be done rather fast) despite having cooldowns, and make the game very easy. The AI is very, very simple and easy to out-maneuver throughout the entire game, and they all follow a set patrol pattern with no real variation. The story is poorly written and honestly barely even there. You're a vampire, with classic hero amnesia, and you have to find the person who turned you (or a powerful elder vampire) in order to avoid a horrible fate. Between the opening and the ending, there's very little else. Almost no character development whatsoever, not even for the main character, and a forced sort of last minute romance between your character and only other person in the game you know more than 2 or 3 things about. It's an odd feeling to listen to these characters and know that they're voiced by talented people, but have the writing be so bad. The protagonist Eric is voiced by none other than Doug Cockle, who voiced Geralt in the Witcher games, but even he can't hide the terrible writing. It's all rushed, vague, short, and flat out generic. Not to mention there is a colossal plot hole at the end of the game. Huge. I won't say it here for obvious reasons, but it's such a huge plot hole it's astounding they didn't notice, or didn't care. The other sounds aren't anything too special, but nothing really stood out as bad to me, except for a couple character's voices. Music is very meh, and I can't remember a single bit of it except for the same song that plays on a loop in the pseudo-hub you enter in the beginning of the game. It also features probably the lamest, easiest, most pathetic final boss any game has ever had ever. The graphics are stylized in a comic-book style, but are pretty bland outside of 3-4 fairly interesting areas. Outside of those limited sections, most of what you'll be going through are large rooms of offices or similar obstacles connected by small hallways or elevators. That is most of the game. The animations are absolutely atrocious. Your character's walking, crouching, running, etc animations aren't that bad, but everything else is. It all feels and looks clunky. Anytime you stealth kill a character it's there. If you feed on someone, every. single. time. you can see that Eric's lips aren't anywhere near the victims neck. It's just bad. Lip sync is also pretty off. With that said... I really liked the vampire vision. It's hard to describe, but the world is viewed in shades of white, purple, and black in this view, and you can see living things through walls and such as red silhouettes, and it kind of looks almost on fire, with everything moving and... well, it just looks cool. It also slows down time when you're using it, and there's no limit to it. It's probably the best thing about the game, but as cool as it is, that's kind of sad. Lastly, I have to mention the save system. The game auto-saves at certain parts thoughout the game, but it also gives you the option of manually saving a limited number of times. Two times, actually. Seems like a strange number of saves, but hey, once you get the hang of the game it's not too hard to rely on the auto-saves. Granted, it can be annoying to redo sections of the map because you made one mistake, but it's not too hard and with only two manual saves, what can you do? Well... press F5, actually. Yeah. Despite you having a limit on how many times you can save through the pause menu, you have unlimited use of the F5 quicksave. The game never tells you about F5, and it isn't anywhere in the options. Why? Why are there two separate ways of saving the game manually? Why is one way obvious and limited, and the other completely hidden but unlimited? It's a mystifying decision on the part of the developers and just another indicator of a rushed, sloppy game. Overall, DARK is a very underwhelming experience, and very disappointing to me personally. It's not necessarily a bad game... but it's very, very sub-par, and not worth anywhere near what it's priced at. I did have fun at some parts, but it was almost in a trance like state, like I had been tricked into not being bored. It's hard to describe. I can say that I don't regret my purchase, as I do like stealth games and vampire lore quite a lot, but I can't recommend anyone purchase it unless the game is around $10.
• Combat Wombat

  Feb 13, 2023

  Good stealth game. But this is a stealth only game. If you get caught you will need to run and hide to survive. Patience is a must in this game, if you try to go all out then the guards will kill you. You get 4x the xp for a totally stealthed kill than what you get for killing them in a straight up fight AND the occasional level up for never setting off the alarm. Why would the developers give gameplay mechanics that will leave you with 20% - 25% of the skill points (which you need to get powerful) of you would get if you just sneaked in? People are strange for complaining about that type of thing. Yet there are people who are complaining about not being good in a fight vs the guards who are your main opponents. Yet just by sneaking up on everything (which requires a lot of patience) I can wipe out an area with no risk of getting injured.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 13, 2013

  I'm just going to say this right now, clear as daylight and leave no room for misinterpretation: This game is bloody horrible and I do not want to play another minute of this mess. The graphics aren't flattering, the animations are unpolished and stiff, the voice acting is an atrocity, the controls are clunky and difficult to use, the story is lax and just about everything is bad. Starting with the graphics, they use cell-shading like in Borderlands, but because of the stiff, robotic and lazy animations they do zero favors to the immersion. The voice acting is flat and monotone, which destroys any immersion that wasn't already squished flat by the animations. It doesn't help that the protagonist sounds like Shadow the Hedgehog after smoking six cartons of cigarettes. Eric Bane (the boring robot you play as) has amnesia, keeps getting random headaches that initiate a horrible cliche and unfinished "omg im so sick" animation cycle and you keep seeing some angel made out of light, that's all there is to Eric. He has no measurable personality whatsoever and he only exists to be bossed around by other bland and dislikeable NPCs. As evidenced by the scene where he learns he is a vampire, which pretty much goes like this: "Bro you're a vampire" "no I'm not" "yes you are" "oh okay". Enemies in levels repeat the same two lines over and over, adding to the sensation that everyone in this game is an emotionless robot with unfinished programming. I haven't played very far into the game, but because it's so bad I'm never going to continue with it. Basically, you're a vampire and you're out to become a "full-fledged vampire" by finding and drinking the blood of the vampire who turned you into a vampire or some ridiculous rubbish like that. All the while that "angel" occasionally comes in and tries to give you words of encouragement, but basically she's another unfinished robot that bosses you around. The gameplay is even worse. Enemies can spot you almost instantly as you try to move from cover to cover, making stealth near impossible at some points while at others they are completely clueless. The Shadow Leap, which is DARK's version of Dishonored's Blink, is uneffective, has a terribly long cooldown, a painfully short range, attracts nearby enemies and the indicator is impossible to control. The "vampiric powers" all suffer from this same design flaw, they're all unecessarily difficult to control and in the long run are completely useless as a majority of them create noise that attracts all the patrolling robot-men in the area. So in summary, dissapointing comes nowhere near to describing DARK. It's a shameless and unfinished mess and there is no way that this heap of a game is worth $40.00. Do yourself a favor and play Dishonored if you want a good stealth game.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 7, 2013

  DARK is one of those titles that shows so much promise but falls just short of being a the solid stealth game it could be. The core mechanics are actually quite enjoyable and reminiscint of the considerably better Dishonored. Your character is easily dispatched if discovered, but has an assortment of skills that aid in remaining undetected and moving quickly. Unfortunately the game is marred by some very poor voice acting by several of the npc characters as well as having a narrative that seems to meander while presenting dubious motivations for the main character to continue onward. The challenge mode is a nice extra, but considerably difficult for even experienced stealth players. Widescreen, controller steam overlay and achievements are natively supported. DARK is a worthwhile game for fans of the genre, but probably not worth full price.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 18, 2016

  You play as Eric Kane, a man who wakes in a nightclub with extreme vertigo and nausea and no knowledge of his past except for his name, he is quickly informed that he has become a vampire and must find his creator before he descends into a feral ghoul, but frequent extreme headaches accompanied by a mysterious angelic creature giving him advice hints at something even more important going on. If you think this is interesting, you're going to be disappointed. This game has a LOT of problems. Firstly, there's absolutely nothing inventive about it, the stealth mechanics, amnesiac story line, revolving around vampires, you have likely seen every single thing in it in other works before, that can be fine if it's all implemented correctly, it isn't. While is game is pretty, there's a lot of points where it seems they just decided not to fix obvious graphical issues, when Eric is running(his normal movement) and you turn, he instantly is facing the direction you wanted to turn to, yes, there is seriously no turning animation while running, it appears rather comical and completely undermines any serious moments. The developers just seemed to not care what the dialog portions looked like, most of the points when you're talking face to face with Rose have the camera jumping around the room suddenly and frequently, it is very disorienting, there was one point when Rose was suddenly levitated off the floor for about a foot and then proceeded to land and keep talking like nothing happened. When guards rush into a room Eric will instantly teleport to a point where they can't immediately see him, but will exit stealth, I know it takes me to a place where they can't spot me instantly but I really just want to shout at Eric and tell him to stop standing up right when his enemies show up in a stealth based game. The characters are...just there, they obviously tried to give them something to set them apart, but they end up falling into tropes anyway, the security manager at the club talks like a frat boy for some reason, I kept watching for him to try and haze me. Rose is basically your support through the game, she's not only a beautiful vampire with large breasts and only wears very revealing clothing, but is the owner of a night club AND a super hacker, immediately wants to help you with all of your troubles upon meeting you and starts flirting with you within the same night you met her(admittedly, the last two there happen in a lot of games, and movies, and everything), have you heard anything that sounds more like a nerd fantasy woman? I haven't. The main character is an amnesiac who talks like Christian Bale's Batman, every line has to forcefully be uttered in the lowest voice possible for whatever reason, though, Deus Ex: Human Revolution had the same fault(minus the amnesiac factor) so I guess I can't really judge it on this too harshly, but there's absolutely no depth to him, he wakes up, decides to not die, that's it. EXCEPT for his reluctance to kill unarmed humanas, for some reason he's absolutely fine with slaughtering a hundred security guards, but a guy with no gun? That's morally reprehensable! There were a few guys near the end of the first area that showed they were complicit in terrible things, but you don't know that beforehand, and it certainly doesn't apply everywhere, you just kill guys that are at work. Maybe the developers were trying to make a point somewhere in there, but it just turns out hypocritical, two people hired by the same company, one given a gun, another isn't, it's fine to kill one of them, though the other is a danger too(unarmed npcs will alert armed ones if they spot you). The writing ranges from not very good to absolutely terrible, with characters responding like someone said a different line every so often, two examples of "What were they thinking when writing this?" are when Eric first finds a UV lamp, he immediately calls in to Rose and asks what it is, she immediately tells him to stay far away from it, so he proceeds to stick his hand in, remark that it hurts a lot, and asks how dangerous it is. I don't understand this, my niece repeatedly wanted to touch an open flame when she was 5 years old, she has since grown out of that, the writers perhaps have not? There's a PDA in the Geocorp building that has someone suspicious of activity in the garden area...his only proof? That it was cleaned without guests coming by, is he from Planet Slob? While there really isn't much depth or interesting material in the story, if you're still interested in finding every little tidbit, well too bad for you, there's a bug that causes the PDAs you pick up to (very often)close instantly and prevent you from reading them, there's no codex or anything to go into in order to read collected ones either, I suppose you could just keep reloading until it decides to display the content of the PDA, but I suggest just taking XP and moving on. As for the combat...there isn't any, it's all stealth, despite being a super fast(not really) and strong(nope) vampire(well, half-vampire) you have absolutely zero melee attacks except for biting, you never pick up guns or any other weapons, either sneak and kill them without alerting anybody or reload, because a single guy with a gun with absolutely ruin you(you are still as fragile as a normal human, I guess). What you DO have on your side are the powers, and my god Shadow Grip is so overpowered, when fully upgraded you will instantly kill someone across the room without making any noise and the body is instantly disposed of. Shadow Leap is your basic power, but I found it slow and lacking in range, also very difficult to target it on the position you want, I wanted to teleport down a floor off the edge of a balcony, but the cursor kept snapping to the wall nearby on the floor I was on. Possibly the worst thing in the game is the weirdly placed invisible walls, why have them in a stealth game? Large open areas under staircases are completely impassable(despite being clearly great hiding spots), when over halfway down a staircase with no railing you aren't allowed to just walk off the side of it as a slight shortcut, I don't know why. Another gripe I have about it is the angelic visions subplot *Spoilers* It goes absolutely nowhere, you're getting hints from this angelic figure of pure light through the course of almost the entire game, then at one point the visions change so the angel's wings are no longer connected, but segmented and floating a distance away from it, I thought this had some kind of significant meaning to it, but after two of the segmented wing angel appearances it went back to the normal angel. I had assumed at one point the M-17 organization was somehow sending Erik orders via this apparition, which was backed up by the end of the first Steiner event, but I realized the glowing white figure between the M-17 agents didn't have wings then, during all the chats with the boss lady of M-17 there's absolutely no reference to sending him messages, so it effectively opens up this big theme of the game and just never follows up. *End Spoilers* So...yeah, this game has a large number of flaws to it, but even with that sneaking through an area really feels genuinely rewarding, my verdict is to get it if you like stealth but not if you want a story.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 1, 2016

  No no no no no no no no no no no no. Don't even consider buying this game. I spent $40 on this garbage(I bought it a while after It's realese). It is just all around bad. The plot, the characters, the voice acting, the gameplay, this is just a disgrace. Don't waste your money on this.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 10, 2016

  Unbalanced Stealth mechanics, cheap guard placement, and unforgiving difficulty. The Voice acting is amazingly bad in that "I could listen to this for hours" kind of way but really if thats the case for you just watch a lets play this is just insane
• gamedeal user

  Oct 9, 2016

  Okay, so this game isn't as terrible as many reviewers have tried to paint it to be. That said, its not that good either. Everything this game tries to do, from atmosphere and graphics on down, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines did 500% better ten years earlier. Frustrating? Yes. Horrible Voice Actor for the main character? Gods yes. Stiff animations? Yes. Clunky controls? Yes. Laughable AI? Most definitely. But past that there is still fun to be had here. The story isn't overly original thus far, and uses as many classic Vampire tropes as it can wedge in, but its just interesting enough to make it worth playing. I'd never suggest anyone paying the full $15 for it, there is just not enough good about it to warrant that price. I could see spending $5 or less on it if you're looking for something new to kill time on and enjoy a plot. Honestly I would suggest flipping it on easy, looking up a cheat program and just playing for the story, otherwise this game will likely make you want to put your fist through your monitor and sue Kalypso for having lost sanity and IQ points permanently to the flaws.