Dark Review

Stealth for suckers. 

A mere 45 minutes into Dark, I found myself confronted with what may be the strangest tip I've ever seen in a stealth-action game: "Some enemies don't move at all, but instead just stand there looking in one direction." That's the kind of thing you'd expect to see in a harshly negative review, but here was Dark, slapping it right there on the screen and apparently taking pride in it. Hey... that’s my job! At least it’s consistent – there’s a thread of obliviousness to its own failure that runs through every layer of the experience. Dark’s faults don't slink around in the shadows like its vampire protagonist; they prance around in the daylight with all the nonchalance of the Care Bears. Such a shame, too, as there's a great concept here and a clear desire to restore some of the badassery that Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels snatched away from the bloodthirsty undead.

Cliched though it may be, I admire the setting Dark presents: a distinctly '90s vision of vampire life, with cocky bloodsuckers lounging around in bass-thumping clubs straight out of Blade. The cel-shaded visual style sometimes recalls the graphic novel aesthetic that works so well for Borderlands and The Walking Dead, and the magical stealth element seems better suited to vampires than to Dishonored's less fantasy-grounded tale. But Dark sucks the life out of that impetus at every turn.
Despite starting out with a promising enough tale of freshly turned vampire Eric Bane fighting to keep himself from becoming a mindless ghoul, it’s all awkwardly kicked aside with the
suggestion that the blood of just about any decades-old vampire can solve Eric's problem just as well of that of his own sire. It doesn't help that all of this unfolds with atrocious voice acting from the secondary cast, as though they were pulled from the street and asked to deliver awful lines like, "The cool thing about us vampires is that we can do some pretty cool shit." (I hear the native German track's marginally better, if only in delivery.) Worse yet, the pacing's so bad you'll hear chatty vampires cutting off each other's lines as the camera jumps back and forth. By the end, the plot clots into such tedium and cliche that I lost all interest in uncovering additional lore via the Mass Effect-style conversation wheels that hint at choice but never deliver it. I wish I could say the stealth or combat gameplay makes up for it, but there’s nothing worth suffering through the performances. There are some clear nods to Dishonored here, what with Eric's ability to use a Nightcrawler-like teleportation spell to flit about, but our hooded hero possesses none of the panache and maneuverability of Arcane's man in the steampunk mask. Instead, Eric lumbers about with stomps that will make apartment dwellers wince, and he can't even jump (aside from rare opportunities for teleports that allow him to climb over walls). Further power comes in the form of a helpful life-seeking toggle that resembles Batman: Arkham Asylum's detective vision in slowmo, which comes as such a blessing I found myself flipping it on every few seconds.

And then there's the actual attacks. Dark insists on keeping the focus on stealth (down to XP penalties for not killing enemies unawares), and so Eric's only combat options consist of one-shot kills that all spend a few seconds noisily slurping the blood out of foes to recharge his few powers. The associated lack of variety quickly grows tiresome, particularly when it's combined with Eric's clumsy movements that left me wondering if he weren't just a little drunk.
Perhaps Eric's adventure would have been more appealing if his human prey posed any real threat. They're a bumbly bunch, complete with AI so laughable that I once performed a full-on suck-a-thon on a guard just 20 feet from his buddy, who seemed to watch the whole thing with voyeuristic intensity. All the while, the screen's alert reticule darkened from white to pink signifying potential danger, but I was able to do the deed and drag the body out of sight before all hell broke loose. (Therein lies another issue – dragging a body inexplicably shifts the camera to first person, resulting in awkward maneuverings around doorways.)
The pain of alerting the guards springs not from their ferocity, but rather in how long it takes for them to give up and go away after you’ve taken cover behind crates and walls – somewhere in the neighborhood of a minute and a half. Dark's roughly 10 hours of gameplay brim with these monotonous interludes, and it's made worse when the bizarre ragdoll physics of your foes bugs and sends bodies flying across the room to alert other guards. On the other hand, the waits occasionally pay off, if not as Dark intends. Pull a bunch of guards toward one of the many rooms they can't enter and then wait them out, and you can pick them off one by one as they amble back into the predictable paths. Much later, ghouls and armored vampires deliver greater threats, but not by much.

Indeed, by that time, you're practically a god. Dark lets you upgrade your core abilities by adding distance to your teleport spell or silencing Eric's clodhoppers a tad, as well as introducing an admittedly awesome distance attack that resembles Darth Vader's Force grip. The downside? Dark gets much, much easier as you progress through the story. By the time I reached the last couple of hours of the six-chapter plot, I was more frustrated by the ennui of clearing out rooms full of guards with almost no checkpoints than I was with boss fights and the act of killing and feeding. As for the “boss fights" themselves? That's a bit of an exaggeration. In one of the most notable encounters, you spend the entire time running laps, stopping just to tap on a computer every now and then. Even Edward Cullen was more cool than that.
Unfortunately for Eric and friends, hubris and hints of a rushed release and inadequate budget render this an anemic stealth RPG at best. Shining the harsh light of criticism Dark reduces it to a pile of ash and bones.