Dawn of Darkness reducks.
Second review, after a recent bored replay of it ended up being more fun and less frustrating. Our first review was really bitter and unfair, but on purpose. It was a Quake 2 mod, a mod of an already crappy game. No reason to give it a chance.
I eventually got bored one day messing around with our newer second computer. It's not a great one but it can play Quake 2 and stuff, and Half-Life. I installed Dawn of Darkness again on a whim. I figured that even though it sucked, I should still be able to plow through it easily, because I'm much more experienced in games. It turns out that the main problems I had with Dawn of Darkness originally wasn't its play so much as trying to get it to play.
We'll cover the cons first.
Cons:
Large download. Apparently this wasn't meant to be a total conversion, but a stand alone game that used the Q2 engine. I don't know what happened, but I can't tell if this game was actually released. As a full game, I don't know if it would be really good, even anymore, compared to the other stuff out there.
Another really bad chunk is the fact that, for the downloadable version, you have to bind everything yourself. Its menu is just a redressed Quake 2 menu. So if you wanted to bind secondary fire to a key, you'd have to read the readme.txt file to find out what the command's name is, or find out from the config.cfg file by opening it with a text editor and then rooting around in it. And also you'd have to know the name of the key you want to bind it to. I actually know how to do this now, so it was a matter of a minute before I got that all set up. But still, even if it's just a mod, that should be possible right through the menu.
Another small con is that it turns out that this is really shorter than a demo, in a way. It's just one map. ONE. One level, one map unseperated. It's a huge one, and there's a lot of going back and forth. I was lost for about 10 minutes once, I think, which is excessive. I remember the first time Josh and I played this, we didn't even get half way through before giving up.
Pros:
Well, what I've learned about the game now. Each weapon has a secondary attack, and they're EXCELLENT. That horrible dagger mentioned in the first review still kind of sucks, but you can still use it to wail away on baddies. The real treat of the dagger is it's secondary attack is a crushing punch that blows enemies back, falling to the ground. I think a big red chunk of gib flies off them too, leaving a bloody trail. I actually had a really fun time punching and punching baddies, beating them down to their backs and still punching them. That was just fucking funny. The punch does a ton of damage, which is probably a first in games.
The puzzles and things were a little interesting once I found out how to get through them.
The bow turns out to be awesome. You can pick up arrows you've fired, and when you hit a baddie, a giant chunk of red gib flies out of them. Cool.
There are also other gameplay additions that are nice, I guess, like strength stats and shit. And items. Health you can carry around. It was all nice I guess. I just remember the awesome moments of beating some dumb soldier down to the ground and pummelling him into dust. I replayed the game after beating it just to experience that. That's why I liked Oni, the battle system was fucking punishing on baddies.
Overall:
More fun than we originally remembered it as. More fun than Quake 2, in fact. THATS NOT SAYING MUCH but still. BUT STILL THATS NOT SAYING MUCH, but really.
John Cable