Soul of Darkness by Gameloft is a moblie game that plays like a CLASSIC castlevania game. Meaning if your into the post CV SOTN this game might not be for you. BUT I think the game is so good that. The Blade & Soul: Prince of Darkness update is NOW LIVE! Hop in game to challenge yourself with an intriguing new 6-player Heroic Dungeon, Brood Chamber. Also, the Blade & Soulmate event is making its annual return to spread love throughout the Earthen Realm with fresh items, including a brand-new costume!
Veteran gamers may remember a title called Another World. At the time of its release it was considered to be pretty ground-breaking stuff, with atmospheric graphics, and gameplay that was deemed (by some) to be challenging. Whether you would agree depends on how much you enjoy being given about ten seconds to solve a puzzle and then dying if you fail to do so.
That was about eight years ago. Thankfully things have moved on and the games industry has since recognised that people do not enjoy being punished with death for failing to solve an obscure puzzle. Unfortunately, Amazing Studios seem to have been living in an underground bunker for the five years it took them to produce Heart Of Darkness, leading to a misunderstanding between them and the rest of the gaming community as to what constitutes entertaining gameplay. You may have guessed by now that Another World and Heart Of Darkness have a lot in common.
Do Or Die
The objective of the game is to guide Andy, the hero, through various levels filled with nasty monsters and fairly simple puzzles. Fair enough, you might think - after all, Abe's Oddysee was pretty good. However, it is no exaggeration to say that this is one of the most annoying games I have ever had the misfortune to play.
Make a note of the fact I use the word 'annoying' and not 'taxing'. This is not a difficult game to get through, although I doubt that any of you will complete much of it because you'll probably have thrown your gamepad at the screen after about an hour's play.
Gripping Stuff...
Picture the scene: Andy is surrounded by monsters. A lot of them. After much faffing about, ducking and diving and chucking fireballs around, Andy kills them all and moves on to the next screen... where he finds another huge group of monsters waiting for him.
Andy then goes through the same rubbish all over again, and eventually dispatches the second group of offending nasties and moves on to the next screen, where he finds he has to scale a wall. That is, a wall in the middle of another group of monsters.
While Andy's arsing about trying to find a grip in the wall, at the same time as chucking tilings at nasties, a big one-eyed blob appears. Unfortunately, the blob appears in the same piece of the wall Andy is occupying. Andy gets knocked off the wall, falls into a big group of monsters and promptly dies.Andy then comes back to life at the same point where the first group of monsters were, and discovers to his amazement that he has to go through every screen again, doing exactly the same things until he gets back to the scene where the offending blob first appeared. Andy turns his computer off and tells Heart Of Darkness it can go f**k itself.
Oh Dear
This chain of events is quite common in Heart Of Darkness.The puzzles are not particularly difficult and the monsters can be dispatched quite easily. But having to do everything again just because of some completely unannounced and unexpected event is laborious some of the time, and a complete pain in the arse the rest of it.
To make matters worse, the low-res graphics (320x200, anyone?) dictate that the game has to be played in a ridiculous letterbox - a complete giveaway that Heart Of Darkness should have arrived on the shelves about three years ago.
And it's a little difficult to imagine a PC gaming community brought up on a diet of first-person shooters and real-time strategy games warming to something that puts you in control of a little kid as he makes his way through a fairytale environment. Actually, Infogrames have an answer for that one: Heart Of Darkness is apparently aimed at a younger audience. Yeah, of course it is. Nothing's more likely to keep the little ones quiet than a stop-start platform game that kills them every five seconds. How silly of us.
Soul Of Darkness Game For Nokia C3
It's actually quite a shame that Heart Of Darkness has turned out to be such a disappointment. Flashback was a very similar game and everyone - including myself - played it to death. Flashback, however, did not kill you every time you moved.Despite the negative tone of this review, there are probably people out there (those with masochistic tendencies spring to mind) who will get a kick out of this type of thing. In my opinion, such people deserve everything they get.