Darkout Review

What doesn't work so well is the combat system. Clarifying statement: there isn't one. Now, Darkout's kin have always had woeful combat, wherein you inorganically swung a sharpened stick frantically at a foe until they keeled over and died, but they too were at least functional. Darkout once again regresses in areas that I thought were essentially stable by removing any kind of knock-back from melee attacks, making it nigh-impossible to fight a single foe without having them claw off half your face first. You can still stun-lock some of them if you're lucky, (and if they're feeling generous, and it's a Thursday) but the attack animations are so floaty that half the time you'll just miss entirely and lose another quarter of your health bar in the process. Perhaps making melee combat so awkward is the game's way of encouraging you to use ranged weaponry, but if so, why is it so sodding difficult to craft bullets? Darkout practically hands you a gun during the tutorial section, but once you expend the ammo you start with it'll be several hours of gameplay before you've researched the necessary materials to re-stock it. It's as if the game takes a certain perverse glee in drawing you in before turning your weapon into a useless lump of metal.

I might have been even more upset if Darkout's approach to death wasn't so careless. In broad terms, dying means nothing. You don't lose your inventory contents and the game thankfully doesn't have any shoehorned-in RPG elements, so you don't lose experience either. With the only punishment being a small hit to the current hitpoints, what would normally be considered a minor setback now becomes an outright helpful tool. I ended up frequently throwing myself off cliffs to my death because it was quicker and easier than trying to trek back to my base across miles of hostile alien terrain, and without meaning to sound confrontational, the point where players start to abuse basic mechanics like that is the point where the game designer has to feel just a little bit ashamed.

Darkout also has a severe problem with polish. Not an outright lack of it, as is quite common with games of its calibre, but a failure to distribute that polish evenly. I am not exaggerating when I say that it sports the best lighting effects of any 2D game I have ever seen, but the animations, as already mentioned, carry all the impact of a paper plane in zero gravity, and the visuals themselves bring to mind a trashy 90s CD-ROM adventure; a chaotic four-lane pile-up at the intersection of Sprite Street and Pre-rendered Promenade. I'm always pleased to see an indie game that doesn't just throw up its arms and yell “alright, let's do pixel art”, but Darkout's alternative is just ill-fitting, like a sweater knitted by somebody with slinkies for elbows. Strangest of all, there's also a very real problem with being unable to traverse tiny bumps in the terrain without hammering the jump button. Normally this would be typical for a Terraria-like game, but the actual smoothness of the terrain makes it look terribly incongruous. Of course, it's possible to look past a lack of polish, but it becomes increasingly difficult with the amount of repetition involved, and looking past it only introduces you a game that is, when all's said and done, really not at all well-designed.

Actually, can we take a moment to thank the unnamed ancient chap who first proposed the scientific method? Without it, you see, this review would not exist, because it was only through rigorous experimentation that I could say half of my criticisms with any degree of certainty. It really is astonishing how little the game tells you. It has a tutorial – something that is, in itself, comparatively progressive – but all it does is tell you the basic controls and primitive crafting, with no thought given to the obtuse research and crafting systems themselves, or how to use the plethora of items that they provide. Once again we have to resort to our old friend, the wiki, and my overall opinion of the game slips down a few more precious notches.

If it sounds like this review is unusually preoccupied with the smaller details, even by my own nit-picky standards, it's because that's all Darkout really does to set itself apart. The more I play them, the more it becomes apparent that these Terraria-like games dry up quicker than a beached whale on the surface of Mercury when they're not being drenched in a concentrated stream of novelty. Darkout can provide that for a while, with its extensive crafting and intricate machinery, but it's just too poorly presented and laced with bad design to match up when most of what it does has been done before, and usually done better.