All that you get to do most of the time is launch your ship, fly around at random looking for some enemies (you're told they're "near the canoe factory" or whatever, but not where the damn thing actually is), shoot them down and fly back to base and start again. Your engineers are constantly striving to invent slightly better craft and weaponry, and the sense of urgency as you grimly try to hold on against the growing threat of the Halons comes across very effectively.īut atmosphere can only carry a game so far.
It's so much of a struggle just keeping your shuttle in the air, that when you finally shoot down hordes of menacing enemy fighters with unguided missiles, it feels like a real triumph. Your shuttle is rickety, and I do mean it: fire too many shots in a row, for example, and the power drain causes you to fall out of the sky. Once you get over the "oooh" effect, though, you'll quickly find that Darker is far from a walk in the park. The city you're defending is nicely realised, with convincingly varied scenery and attention to detail, like the clock tower which chimes as you putter past. The graphics in Darker is much better than most games of its time. The problem is, your race is hopelessly behind in the technological race, so your shuttle is very slow and rickety at best. Your task is to fight the Halon, the race which is in control of the light side of the planet, to wrestle controls from them. You are the Delphi, one of two races on a curious planet where one side is perpetually in daylight and the other is perpetually in darkness. I suspect they would've hated the game a lot less otherwise!ĭarker is a very atmospheric spaceflight simulator that, ironically, pays too much attention to atmosphere at the expense of playability. It's pretty funny how Underdogs clearly wasn't aware that a map even existed when they wrote their review. This system seems like a form of copy protection, but the map doesn't have any photocopying countermeasures so it's rather unsophisticated for a 1995 game. The city is huge and there are no in-game objective markers, just a compass and current coordinate indicator mission briefings and in-game comms use names of landmarks and suburbs to refer to objective locations, which can then be looked up on the map to find their grid reference. The thing is, the game originally came packaged with a map of the city in which all gameplay takes place if you don't have the map, it's pretty much impossible to play. Got this comment from Janet, who sent the game map:ĭarker is a game that I don't think many people care about, but I played it a lot when I was a kid so it has a special home in the back of my brain.
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