Darkfall: Eurogamer RE-Review

A month ago, Eurogamer reviewed Darkfall Online and handed it a 2/10 score. The outcry from Darkfall fans and devs was mythic. Find out if Darkfall fared any better in Eurogamer's second review.

Let's just say...4/10 is a slight improvement.

Darkfall believes that MMOs are all about slow improvement, so any improvement in any area is a good improvement - and, as such, it's best to start in a situation you hate so you feel better when the artificial limitation is removed (like, say, the first X: Beyond The Frontier thinking it a good idea to start without the time-dilation function). It's a game which believes suffering is good for you, in all its forms. At its best, this lends the struggles of the game a real intensity. At its worst, it renders the game tedious or openly nonsensical due to the unforeseen implications of the rules.

And...

Darkfall's control system is, to be polite, a mess. It is, to be less polite, a bloody infuriating graceless mess.

It manages to be so on such a fundamental level that when I explain it it's going to sound as confusing as it actually is in play. Even simple tasks like swapping weapons manage to become potentially disastrous.

Finally...

At the moment, I don't think there are many who will put up with Darkfall's madness. I certainly won't. I hope Darkfall grows and becomes a game which can take its charms and appeal to a wider audience (EVE wasn't EVE when it launched, for example - it began with fine ideas that appealed to a niche, and as they improved the game it sold its ideas to an ever-larger niche). Darkfall's just launched in the US and its expansion has gone live, after all. But as a game, it's just not there yet, its rewards too distant and the road there too barren to recommend to fellow travellers.

I doubt that will please Aventurine any more than the first review did but at least the guy logged in more time on the game, which was one of the things devs kvetched about the most.

Read the rest of this terrific and comprehensive review at the link above.