Games worth discovering

Dark and Light Mobile is the open-world you might spend hours in if the lag doesn’t drive you crazy

19K View2023-09-27

SHOULD I PLAY DARK AND LIGHT MOBILE?

I suggest holding off on playing it for now. Dark and Light Mobile is an open-world MMORPG currently in beta testing. I was immediately impressed with the game’s visuals while roaming through the forests, hunting for resources in the middle of a lightning storm. Unfortunately, that strong first impression didn’t last. Constant lag, a grindy progression system, and clunky controls that are clearly not optimized for a mobile device hold Dark and Light Mobile back from being a game I’d want to keep in my gaming library for now.

TIME PLAYED

I spent around four hours on Dark and Light Mobile, collecting resources and crafting new items for the most basic tasks. While the game’s goals will be familiar to anyone who’s played a survival game before, I often felt like I was doing homework rather than playing a game.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT DARK AND LIGHT MOBILE?

• Those cool visuals. Dark and Light Mobile is clearly trying to use the power of the Unreal Engine to optimize its look on mobile devices, and in many ways, it succeeds. The forest environment my character spawned in was immersive and exciting. Minor changes to the surroundings, like weather shifts, were a nice touch. I liked how rain droplets would appear on my phone screen during storms, so it felt even more like my character was experiencing the storm. The character customization system was also detailed, and allowing me to tweak my character down to the smallest features on his face.

• Epic music. Dark and Light Mobile’s great score made me want to explore all over the map. I felt like I was in the middle of a cinematic montage of weapon crafting and base-building.

• Solid voice acting. Dark and Light Mobile comes fully equipped with a cast of talented voice actors. The voice-overs added personality to the characters I met.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN DARK AND LIGHT MOBILE?

• Welcome to lag city. Unfortunately, all those excellent visuals come with a cost: the large amount of lag in Dark and Light Mobile. I got so frustrated when I was trying to do even a simple task like skinning a beast and was met with crippling slowdown. It seemed to happen even when nothing major was going on. The act of running through a town or encampment would lead to the game freaking out. And all of this was while playing on my iPhone 13, which isn’t that old by phone hardware standards. If your device came out before 2021, I wouldn’t expect to get to this game to run at all.

• No directions and endless grinding. Dark and Light Mobile pulled me in with some intriguing lore that had me thinking about the game’s potential. Yet in my playthrough, missions were relegated to run here, collect this, run there, collect that. These fetch quests were repetitive and downright dull.

To make matters worse, the game also fails to explain important information. I spent forty-five minutes trying to activate my personal totem for one quest, only to realize that doing so required shifting to a different server. Between the boring objectives and the lack of guidance, I found myself drained of any enthusiasm pretty quickly.

• Terrible sound mixing. Remember those cool environmental factors like the storms I mentioned earlier? They rocked, except when another character was speaking or describing a quest. Character dialogue was often drowned out by the sounds of lightning or rainfall. I was stuck reading subtitles just to follow along.

• Clunky controls. Dark and Light Mobile is clearly designed for PC—the PC version of the game launched in early access back in 2017—and has yet to really be optimized for mobile. Tapping on my phone was frustrating, and I often selected items that I didn’t mean to. On top of that, the combat felt stiff and awkward; trying to battle and defend using the tiny touch screen was a nightmare.

💬 Will you play Dark and Light Mobile? Let me know in the comments!