Too much to do – Darkness Rises: Adventure RPG Review

I should preface this by saying I’m kind of a min maxer so I like to be as efficient as possible. I would say most people aren’t like me so maybe you’ll have a different experience from myself. TL;DR Game is really pretty, but the overall early game experience is terrible. Bad UI, terrible inventory management issues, and simply too much stuff to do in order to be even remotely competitive joining in this late. Not for me. First I’ll start with what I enjoyed. The graphics are great. They’re honestly top of the line and if you’re someone who values that in a game there isn’t much that can beat this game on mobile. The combat feels great most of the time(I’ll hit on this later). Fun combat is an absolute must for games like this, and most of the time it does feel satisfying to play. For me the negatives definitely outweigh the negatives for players like myself. The first big issue I hit was that simply there was TOO MUCH to do. Most people would love that, but for me it became a chore really really quickly. Secondly, the balance in the game is absolutely horrendous especially starting out. If you enjoy your PvP then I would say probably the first 50 hours of in game play(including auto fighting for grinding) will be terrible for you. The PvP dueling and Team PvP are on a “ladder” but these ladders reset so frequently that you’ll seemingly get placed with people who are easily 10 times stronger than you. As someone who enjoys PvP seeing someone tank a full combo from you and then return back one skill to one shot you is really disheartening. Third for me is simply how slow progression really is. I maybe did something very very wrong, but it probably took me 24 hours(of actually playing) to go up 20 levels or so. When you consider how the typical RPG leveling system goes where you spend exponentially longer to level each level you can quickly see how long it would take for you to get towards the end game. In conjunction with this, probably one of the BIGGEST deterrents for me was the fact that in order for me to really min/max I would need to do this 6 times. The game encourages you to make multiple characters(1 of each class) and level them to 100. There are a lot of built in systems that utilize your other characters. One of these systems is the fact that your other characters stats all benefit each other. For example 1 level 100 character will boost stats for all of your other characters by 10%. This is just an example of one of the systems that push you to get as many toons as possible to max level. The next issue I had was that the UI outside of combat was atrocious. Clutter all over the screen. If you’re like me you don’t like seeing red dots indicating “you’ve got something to do” up so you’ll go and do what you can to clear that. The issue is that very frequently red dots will pop up, and they’ll each have their own windows to go through. Gear, skills, inventory, etc all for me constantly get that dreaded red dot. After each stage I clear more red dots; after each ranked match more red dots; after doing raids more red dots; after clearing a coop dungeon more red dots. You get the idea. There’s also an issue with inventory space. Most of the rewards you get from doing dailies or whatever give you TONS of things that go into your inventory and when you have 60 slots total for all gear which you feed into the gear you have you’ll quickly run out of space. It becomes a horrible horrible game of CLEAN THIS MESS UP every 10 minutes. Overall it got overwhelming real quick and as someone who doesn’t want to commit that much time and energy to a game I’d have to pass
Review by Paqmeow on Darkness Rises: Adventure RPG.