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Challenging, thrilling, and fun to play | Full Review - Dark Season

1K View2023-03-10

Dark Season is an RPG mobile game with a mix of dungeon crawling, rogue-lite, and bullet-hell elements, sprinkled with a bit of gacha gaming.

🟩Pros

+Challenging combat

+Engaging game mechanics

🟥Cons

-Playtime is heavily limiting

📝Notable points:

No english version so far

Dark Season is a brand new one-handed play mobile game currently available on Android, only in the Korean Language, an unfortunate news for international players. Barring some language barriers, it is still highly playable and the game is easy to understand.

The world of Dark Season is a weird one. A cross between medieval fantasy and a modern setting, and a realm populated by various magical beings. It’s pretty weird seeing guns, tanks, drones, and computers in a medieval looking setting alongside magic portals and mystical beings, but that’s how the game is.

Gameplay Analysis

Players control a lone hunter, battling various different monsters across over 70 stages, with three levels per stage and nine areas per level (70 stages - 3 levels each - 9 areas each) There are 26 different weapons that players can unlock and play with. It combines aspects of the dungeon crawling, rogue-lite, and bullet-hell genre; and crossbreeds a game that is both challenging and thrilling to play.

Dark Season is not an easy game, in fact the difficulty is immediately evident even in the first ever level. It will test players' abilities to effectively dodge incoming projectiles and enemy attacks, while trying to come up with their own attacks. What’s impressive is, this depth of combat is all done with just one-hand.

Attacks are determined by the character’s two weapons, randomized from a pool of unlocked weapons upon entering a level. At first, players start with only two, and subsequently unlock more weapons every two stages or so. This continues up to the very end of the game, giving players something to look forward to throughout the entirety of the experience.

The type of weapon determines the attack mechanics, which boils down to two main categories. Melee and Ranged, Ranged attacks are deadly and tactical, but require a standstill to automatically fire upon the closest enemy. Melee attacks can cleave and activate even while moving, but you need to be up close and personal with the enemy.

The enemies on the other hand all have different attack patterns and behavior, with over 30 types of enemies to encounter, not counting the various bosses as well. The nature of attacks are very creatively varied, some using a plain melee attack, some shooting projectiles with differing patterns, some are burrowing in the ground or teleporting around, some are splitting into more forms upon death.

Fairly challenging

Dark Season is challenging, yes, but it is fairly balanced. Amidst all the bullet-hell clutter and the barrage of enemy attacks, everything still is properly cued visually to the player. Giving players the right amount of time and proper cue to evade attacks. It never felt unfair, but make no mistake, it is unforgiving.

The rogue-lite nature exists in the form of temporary character bonuses, where every once in a while, when players clear an area, a choice is presented to them. It’s either focus on your attacks, or defense, or a little bit of both. Once the level ends, the bonus disappears. However, progression for both the characters' levels and the stages are retained and do not reset upon death.

The gacha mechanics

An added challenge is introduced because the game is heavily limiting due to a restrictive time-currency/energy feature. So you only have very limited tries before you run out of energy and have to wait again so you cannot binge-play this game to completion, a typical gacha game element, but one that I find doesn’t go well with the fun dungeon crawling nature of the game, at least no in its current state. I want to play more and try more levels!

As players progress throughout the game, they will unlock more characters to play and level up; and more rewarding gameplay elements to tinker with.

Some of these elements include a mini-challenge system that grants rewards upon completion of a required conditions, collecting some magic eggs to hatch in 30 minutes, again giving rewards to the player, and collecting some keys to open loot chests. As with gacha mechanics, everything can be skipped/quickened by spending some cash.

On the technical side, the graphics look charming and are of cel-shaded anime design. The animations are decent and the game overall feels solid to control, especially with the one-handed control scheme. The hits to enemies feels good and the different enemies and attack effects are all visually distinct. However, I’ve encountered some very minor targeting issues, there are moments where the character isn’t firing at enemies for no discernable reason.

Conclusion:

Dark Season is challenging, thrilling, and fun to play. Many of its gacha gaming aspects are very friendly and it’s not really a heavy pay-to-win system. However it is time consuming because of these waiting elements and at the same time, heavily limiting due to the time-currency mechanic. If you don't have the time to play mobile games but are looking for a simple but challenging game on bite-sized daily sessions, this might be the game for you.

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