Veteran
Posts: 153
 
| ?It’s like when Cipher tells Neo that he no longer sees the code of the Matrix only here instead of seeing “ blonde, brunette, red-head,” it’s pass, fake-out, TOUCHDOWN!DarkOut reviewed: You have delved too greedily, and too deep. By James Pinnell on December 12, 2013 at 7:47 am It's mindboggling to think that only a few short years ago, Minecraft was a tiny speck of an idea buried within the mind of a quiet, fedora wearing Swede. Its launch and subsequent viral spread championed a brand new genre where creativity and ingenuity took precedence over firepower and brute force. Since then, Cabal games like Terraria and more recently, Starbound, have broadened the base of these titles to include more complicated blueprints for crafting creations, alongside introducing Cheap Cabal Gold more traditional forms of dungeon clearing and loot collection.But not every new branch from the tree has borne fruit Cabal games like Ace Of Spades, which attempted to combine FPS with block creation, and Cube World, which put more stock into the RPG side of things, both encountered serious problems with their design and execution.The latest title to take a leaf from the Terraria -side of the family almanac is DarkOut, a thoroughly ambitious indie darling that has been shuffled through an extraordinarily long 2.5 year development period. But there's been a lot to show for it the Cabal game has a gorgeous art style, randomly generated environments with tons of biomes, bunkers with AI survivors, vehicles and a host of other goodies shoved into every algorithm that spawns a brand new world. This world is also notoriously creepy too; if you've ever seen Pitch Black, well, so have the developers this planet is dark, dank and teeming with creatures primed to make your skin crawl. As in the film, light is an extraordinarily important factor to your survival, so much so that you're given flares and a flashlight in your rookie pack of gear.But here's the rub, and this rub is becoming all too symptomatic of projects with heavily invested supporters and too much groupthink the Cabal game does an absolutely terrible job of explaining anything to you. From the 1995-esque click next for more text tutorial, to the lack of information or guidance to how enemies spawn, to how the light structure works, or why enemies are attacking you before you've even had a chance to learn why your pistol shoots blanks. It doesn't help that clickingNext' in the tutorial isn't linked to any context, or that sometimes you can't do the first task without deleting and recreating a new world and character, but also that your mouse is linked to view and the box sits on the bottom of the screen. Once you've managed to churn through the first part of the tutorial, however, you've already realised that the art of crafting in DarkOut is painfully bad.The rule of thumb with creating complex crafting and build mechanics in Cabal games is twofold explaining the basics to Cabal players so they can learn the more advanced functions and easter eggs on their own, and providing an interface. |
1995-esque click next for more text
