評論

• gamedeal user

  Jun 5, 2020

  First game was good mechanically, but felt a little rough around the edges, This time the visuals are so much better: environments are beautiful, animations are improved greatly, spell casting visualy is just eye candy, especially in darker areas. When it comes to spell mechanics, this is the best spell casting power fantasy out there. Spell gestures are easy to learn and extremely satisfying to use. The targeting system has been improved so much it's illegal how satisfying it is, combined with gorgeous spell visuals. Story is nothing outworldly but it is more than enough to keep you going just to see places and get new spells. This game definately scratched the itch the first game gave me, where the original game was promising, Dark Times delivers. So worth the wait.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 7, 2020

  The only game I have ever played where the swamp section was the best section. Not enough content to justify the current price, though- breezed through the story and most of the collectibles in 3 hours or so. Wait for a sale, 25% or more.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 14, 2021

  DO NOT BUY THIS IF YOU'RE LOOKING FOR A GAME. This is an EXPERIENCE, not a GAME. Do not let the videos fool you. TLDR: Buy it on sale. Worth the buy for the levels and the fun spellcasting, but not at all worth it for the rest of the game. I am rating this negatively even though I really would like to rate it a "meh", solely on the grounds that it should be classified as an experience. Further, in my opinion, it is not worth the 25 EUR price point. The level design alone is beautiful but the rest of the game falls flat, and given that there's only a few hours of content (from what I can tell) it's kind of hard to justify it. HLA is just $15 more and is a much meatier game. PROS: - Superb environment design. Better than a lot of "normal" games. Even if this were an asset flip, whoever put the levels together has some serious skill. It's visually beautiful and cohesive. Great job, devs. - The gestures are awesome and I look forward to games utilizing similar mechanics in the future. - The spells are unique and take advantage of VR (though see the Con below about repetition). Casting feels satisfying even after the 100th time, which delighted me. - The voice acting was relatively well done, even though the dialog was a bit lackluster. CONS: - Those screenshots are a lie. I'm not sure how they rendered those but the game is not as stunning as what's in the screenshots. - The audio in this game is a dumpster fire, which as a game music producer really pains me to say. The music is cute at first but it's like they bought one track and decided "yeah that's enough". Any time you go into battle, it's the same shit over and over again. I finally had to turn the music off, which I really hate doing. Further, the enemies make this growl that is audible literally wherever you are, and so every five seconds for the entire game there's some growl off to the left. It annoyed me more than my parrot annoys me. - Movement is glitchy at best, aggravating at worst, and it's easy to get stuck or lost. Further, if you accidentally clip your head into something (like a wall, which there are a lot of in this game), everything goes black. It makes me really sick whenever it happens, even though I can otherwise play for hours. - The enemies are dumber than rocks. They require zero strategy to kill and some of them glitch and just stand there, frozen, doing nothing (and no, I didn't freeze them myself). There was absolutely ZERO challenge to the game because of this, and one of the largest reasons why I consider this an experience. - The storyline is linear. Seriously, this is as much of a walking simulator as it is a magic game. There is exactly one way to go through the game, one way to kill enemies, and one way to finish. Even the narrator got annoyed at how much walking had to be done. The developers should have stopped when they were writing the three or four different lines of "oh look, ANOTHER room" and been like "you know, maybe we're making them walk way too much". - It's buggy. Not a lot, but not exactly polished. You can fall through the world at a few points and have to restart from the last checkpoint (there are a lot of checkpoints, so this isn't much of an issue for me as I'm pretty forgiving with VR titles). There are some portals that just hard-cut to the next area. No audio, no visual effects, nothing. I thought I glitched but it turns out it was just the next part of the story. "Guess we're here" I audibly said, a bit disappointed. ----------- As I said in the beginning, this is more of an experience. You do more walking than fighting, more looking than doing, and more twiddling your thumbs than casting spells. I spent more time walking than I did killing things. The enemies are really boring to kill, and the spells are INCREDIBLY overpowered. They're cool, beautiful, and fun to play with, but that lasts about 20 minutes. You walk to a room, kill everything in a few seconds, walk to the next room, kill everything, listen to some dialog, sit on an extremely slow troll thing, walk some more, climb a wall, punch some crystals and then... yeah. Repeat that a few times, and you have this game. I was really disappointed there.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 10, 2020

  The wizards; Dark times could end up to be one of the best VR games to play. However, currently it is not. The core idea of this game is to let hand movement determine what spell you are casting and how powerfull that spell is. This is the best magic gameplay I have ever played. The spells are well made and even more fun than in Carbon Studios previous game The Wizards. The levels are original and well made (even if it is rather linear) and the narration as you progress is a nice touch. Great as these are, the games has some problems. A lot of rocks, tree's and mushroom have large invisible hitboxes. Trying to shoot arrows between tree's and from behind rocks will not do. You will only hit these hitboxes. The stairs and ramps have collison issues where you can not walk up the stairs normaly and need to take a step back to walk around the center of the stairs. Some levels have clipping ussues and flying models like mushrooms and rocks. The enemies in this game are very simple, they have one or two attacks and thats it. They wont dodge or hide. To make the game more challenging as you progress the game will simply throw in more enemies. Once you get a decent area of impact spell the game becomes a walk in the park. Or you take a shield in one hand and spam throw with the other, that works as well. The game is still being worked on and can become one of the best, but at this moment I can not recommend it.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 15, 2021

  I had to refund, because none of the controls were working for me (Oculus Quest 2). Same goes for the other Carbon Studio products (The Wizards and Tempestfall as well). Too bad, looked really fun.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 7, 2020

  while the Game Concept is REALLY cool, this Execution is not the best. Right off the bat I had 2 crashes with my Oculus Rift s and a lot of slowdowns even on medium settings. While I love the Gesture system for casting spells, but It Felt unresponsive at times. I had issues where some spells like the shield just wouldn't cast no matter how much I did the gesture, and most of the time accidentally do fireball. and in the heat of combat, it can be VERY annoying. resulting in me just flailing my arms around till it worked :( Level Design is Rather confusing, Lots of Dead ends with nothing at the end, unclear paths that rather lead to death or backtracking. No secrets or collectables. areas tend to be Empty of anything of note, and the two chests i found almost felt like scams, You completed the puzzle! but there was no reward? the narrator dude even says the money you found is worthless. Sound is almost non existent, with the same looping combat music every encounter. while the spells Look awesome, They Don't Feel powerful, and i think the sound design has a Lot to do with it, they don't sound powerful. And the majority of the time there just isn't any Sounds, no music or anything. gives everything a Boring/Off feeling rather than a WOW feeling. Enemy design is good, but again the sounds, they barely make any! i had 2 mushroom dudes sneak up on me and i didn't even know they were there till they exploded on me. the enemies need more sound queues to clue the player where they are and when the player is in danger. Like the Ice witch, You have no way of predicting when she will use a ability that will freeze you in place. especially if she is right beside you. Lots of Options for Movement and play styles! Very good!! but i wouldn't use continuous motion, you tend to get stuck on a lot of the geometry of the level, and the teleport can basically put you anywhere without hassle. I was hoping for something more like the Half Life alyx system, and you can get something very similar to that here, but Smooth teleport is recommended until continuous motion can be fixed up. If your looking for a spell slinging, sword battling, Monster slaying game,(and have a Oculus) I would reccommend "Asgard's Wrath" over this, much better polish. a steam equivilant would be "Blades and Sorcery" Much more fun with a Very good Combat system. While I wish the Developer the Best of luck improving the game, I can't recommend it to anyone right now.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 10, 2021

  I finished it already and I have to say it was very fun to play. You will really feel like a powerfull wizard on certain parts. It also has great fantasy/epic locations to be in VR, and it has a good concept using the spells with VR controller motions. The cons is that the controls are not 100% perfect yet and you will struggle to pull them correctly on certain high action situations (you may also think this as part of the difficulty in the game) But, most of the time they do work correctly with minimum practice and they are very fun and rewarding to use. Single Player Campaign feels somehow short but it is certainly worthy. It has a Campaign+ mode to re-play it with all the spells unlocked and harder combat encounters (I just started playing this mode) Visually the game looks great in many aspects, the sense of scale of different locations is a joy to watch. The levels have very good diversity with specific twists. There are not too many enemy types but there is a good variation to put the player on certain challenges, also of course certain spells work better for certain enemies and you will learn this with practice as well. I believe the game has still a much stronger potential with harder difficulty and maybe I would have asked for 2 or 3 more bosses/levels. There are puzzles but very easy to complete, to be honest I would have preferred more combat sequences instead of those puzzles :P For me this game was like an 8/10. Here is some gameplay video I recorded: https://youtu.be/KWfvY66QWYE I didn't tried the Arena mode but I will update the review later for this.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 27, 2020

  An improvement over the original which was already very good. I'll be keeping on eye on this developer and I hope they continue the series.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 13, 2020

  I thought the first game was pretty fun so I decided to give the sequel a shot. Unfortunately it doesn't quite keep the good times rolling. The game feels hollow and soulless. I cant quite put my finger on what it is. It just isn't engaging. Its too 'gamey'. The developers did not try to disguise the gameplay loop at all. Walking sequences, combat sequences and disembodied voice dialogue sequences. In that order. On repeat. But that aside, its not really the reason I do not recommend purchasing this game. The reason I recommend you hold off on your purchase is because around the 2.5 to 3 hour mark I encountered 3 game breaking bugs in a row. First, I got stuck in the "home base". The portal back to the level simply did nothing. Second, when I was fighting the lightning boss, he got stuck in his lightning form, would not fight back, and could not be hit. Third during the sequence where you ride on the ogres back to cross the acid pit, I was teleported back to the start of the sequence when the ogre put me down. This left me stranded back at the start with no way to get across. I recommend you give the developers a few weeks or months to fix some bugs, and if they actually do, then it might be worth your money.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 15, 2020

  maybe its just not for me but I hate these blanket empty storys. its a 12 minute story stretched to I'm guessing 2 hours, I didn't even want to finish it. Nothing was really happening I just went into the same small easy fights and exploring this world that felt like it was just repeating itself. the spells with the gestures feel great, sound could be better, maybe louder make the spells feel more intense through the sounds. Overall I do NOT like these, no choice, invincible games, I just go through it plowing through enemies because I have these overpowered spells, and even if they just unload on me the game babies me and I can't die ever. there are no choices, its just one route and everyone gets through it exactly the same, maybe you favor one spell over the other but thats as far as your individuality goes playing this game. I'd say if these spells were a bit more polished in a game with a real story, and difficulty to it it would be AWESOME, but as of now, unless its like 99 cents I wouldn't recommend it