REVIEW

Dark Devotion Review

by Luke Walsh, May 6th, 2019

Many games have tried to recreate the formula that made Dark Souls so successful, mainly by trying to make games impossibly hard as a way to frustrate players into wanting to get that “reward” at the end. Dark Devotion is a game which has mirrored itself on Dark Souls’ ugly and monstrous backstory of demons taking over and your character is a Templar, humanity’s last hope in reclaiming the land.

Dark Devotion has a beautifully crafted pixel world which creates a gloomy atmosphere in the dimly light rooms you call your home and the endless corridors of dungeons filled with monsters. It’s just a shame that the combat and overall direction of the game tend to lose itself by trying to be a Dark Souls like game.

Combat is one of these areas where the game lets itself down as it reverts to the Stamina based combat approach where it becomes a resource tied to swinging your weapon, blocking enemy attacks and dodge rolling out of the way. Combat tends to wear a little thin as the same approach is taken in every single fight – roll in, attack once or maybe twice and roll away.

The problem with stamina restricted combat is it becomes repetitive and tied to an enemies animation to rinse, repeat the same actions over and over. Combine this with the dungeon crawling aspect of the game you tend to feel a massive amount of Deja Vu every time you go exploring. This really starts to kill the satisfaction of diving further into the dungeon when you did the same thing in the room before and the room before that.

Stumbling across new enemies makes the adventure a little more interesting and gruelling at the same time as you need to learn how these new enemies fight. Enemies are quite broad from those who charge at you with broadswords, fire-wielding lantern swinging enemies and nimble beast claw rouge types plus more as your journey deeper.

After some time though, you do get the same attrition as you did before, starting to pick up on their patterns but the game does throw in enough new enemy types along the way to not make it always about killing the same two monsters over and over. The game also tries to make it ‘harder’ by just throwing more enemies at you rather than increasing the difficulty of one mob, which feels a little cheap.

Bosses can be found in the deeper areas of the dungeon at places near the end of a section. Fights are pretty well choreographed which take time to understand their attack movements. Some also improve the help from other enemies or use long-range projectiles or the environment to throw you off balance. They’re also tough but in an overpowered boss way, more how they chain together skills and have more health. Even when predictable after a couple of times boss fights are challenging and one of the more fun areas of the game.

Dark Devotion is not randomly generated like other dungeon crawlers so the goal of the game is to clear the dungeon and make your way further and further down. You use a number of ladders, doors and secret passageways to explore the dungeon and your map updates as you find new areas. You spend about the first hour in the main dungeon and can head to an underground sewer.

On my journey, I also somehow stumbled in an underground town which was a little jading, as it feels like you have been flipped upside down. It’s these sort of areas that don’t connect together very well and struggle to get an overall feel for what the world needs to be like to progress. Moving through the dungeon should go one way or the other, heading from inside to outside and moving through the world. A lot of the time is spent in the dungeon which seems like a missed opportunity really.

Along the way you are able to smash crates, loot fallen Templar Knights and other enemies with gear that can help you survive longer. These items are randomised and vary to help your survivability from bandages and surgical kits to heal wounds, to holy hand grenades and bombs to decimate enemies or open weak walls to new locations.

Weapons can also be picked up along the way that your character, I picked up a number of pretty nice looking weapons from sword and shields that are quick but weak, two-handed swords that are slow but powerful and ranged weapons like a bow and arrows. There are also magical texts which can be collected that use faith to fire at your enemies. As you can only hold two sets of weapons at a time, so choosing them becomes dependent on your play style and the enemies ahead. Magical books can be held with a weapon instead of a shield allowing additional damage at the expense of defence.

Praying is one of the main mechanics in the game, using up faith you collect by killing enemies and beating bosses it can be spent on a number of things. Different altars are spread throughout the dungeons which can heal your character, cure diseases that you pick up the longer you spend exploring and swapping faith to unlock doors or gain some items. It’s a useful mechanic when out in the dungeon and they’re evenly spread out for them to help with going further through each section. As you imagine, the ones that heal your character seemed rarer than the ones that gave out items.

As you travel you tend to remember paths and traps, which is useful considering traps can weaken you minutes within walking into the Ancient Ruins. When you die in Dark Devotion you lose all your current gear and head back to the hub area, Filthblood Shelter, where you prepare yourself to start all over again. You can head to the smith to kit yourself out with weapons and armour, some which can be found in the dungeon and available again each time you die.

Other areas in the hub allow you to upgrade your character by unlocking skills through a resource gained when killing enemies in the dungeon. Skills allow your character bonuses to their base stats, stamina regeneration or being able to see in the dark. The more you unlock, the higher up the tree you can go and the more useful the skills become. As with any Dark Souls style game, it takes time to collect these “purple orbs” that are used, so choosing just the right skills you need at each tier is crucial rather than trying to unlock them all.

Narrative, direction and pacing are a few problems in the game. The narrative is almost no existent after the opening credits of the game. You are a Templar, who does an Assasin’s Creed entrance of being overpowered and then dies by a mysterious enemy to be brought back to life as an entry-level character who need to dungeon dive to get more powerful again. It’s a tried and tested story opening but unimaginative.

Throughout the game, characters talk to you but not really in much of a way to tell you about the journey you are on, what needs to be done or why they are even there in a dark shanty town in some ancient ruins. There’s an overall lack of direction from the game, intended or not it can make you feel confused and unable to get a sense of progression.

Quests can be given to you in the hub area but again don’t seem all that connected to what your character is doing at any point. The first one is to kill the common enemy, after that, you kill some later enemies but completing one quest does not push you to the next area to kill the others. Once completed you also have no way to hand them in unless you die, losing all your hard earned progress – later in the game, you can push teleport back but at the expense of respawning all the bosses again.

Ultimately this means you spend a lot of your time aimlessly wandering through the dungeon killing a lot of the same enemies with no real reason or progression. Sometimes you slay monsters you need for your quest, other times you stumble on bosses that you kill and then move onto new areas all the while not knowing where to really go next.

Dark Devotion is a nice pixel art game that seems to have lost its way without trying to stand out from the Dark Souls genre. It could have been better taking a more fluid approach like Bloodborne instead of the Stamina controlled version it is. There’s stuff to like about Dark Devotion like the boss fights and interesting way it handles health and praying but falls short in others. It’s my sort of game but due to not feeling like having any direction and the repetitive combat made it harder to pick it back up again after I stopped playing which is a shame.