Buy DARK

Just bad.

You get introduced as a supposedly half vampire right off the bat. You wanna be a real vampire? Do some stealth stuff. K. And the stealth system is so bad. You get only 2 saves per area. Considering how often you have to redo everything because of the crappy system its not enough.

Graphics wise it looks okay. But you have no facial expressions. Just static faces with the mouth moving. Pretty laughable.

If you want to play a good vampire game just stick to vampire the masquerade: bloodlines. Despite being 15 years old its still better in every way possible. It has better graphics, better combat system, better stealth system, a great lore and an awesome community that to this day continues to release patches to better the game.

Just stay away from this game.

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

Horrible game design through and through. Only got it cause I was hoping for something like Vampire Bloodlines: Masquerade. What a mistake. Definitely not worth 60$, hell if I had a second chance I would only pick it up for 5$ to then install then just delete

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- Advertisement when starting the game

Story is, acceptable.

Combat is just the worst i've ever seen in my life.

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.

Great story. Loved it until the end and i'd reccomend this to anyone.

Cannot recommend Dark.

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.

What makes me really sad about this game, is that it had huge potential. It could have been on the same level with Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, if the developers had only put more effort into fight mechanics and storyline.
The visuals of the game are great. Areas are quite large, which is a good thing. The sneaking system is well done- no complains there. You have to be sneaky in order to survive and multiple upgradable abilities make this task easier.
But that is all that was good about the game. While sneaking around and alert sytems were well executed, the rest was not. If you get caught by an enemy- you are doomed. There is no normal, non-stealth combat whatsoever. You have to get close to an enemy to hit them, which can often lead to them alerting everyone and killing you before you even get to them. It feels clumsy and unifinished- as if the developers simply ran out of time and decided to focus on sneaking around and stealth, completely ignoring normal combat.
Another bad thing about this was the story. It seems to me that whoever created this played a little bit of Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines and wrote the story in 5 minutes. The characters are bland and boring, dialogues are badly written. Although you have dialogue options, they are useless.they are sidequests, but most of them are just small grab-an-item-and-return-it quests, which give you little bit of exp.
Overall, the look of the game is nice and the stealth system is great, but the rest is horrible. I finished this game once and gave it another try for the trading cards, but it is quite hard to play it, as it seems so unfinished. With more time and recources, it could have been a great game. A shame really...