When is a Meteoidvania, not a Metroidvania? When it’s Dark Light! This gorgeous action platformer from Mirari & Co, certainly looks and often feels like a Metroidvania but it actually borrows various gameplay elements from other games to deliver something familiar yet fresh. Gameplay doesn’t really do anything to reinvent the genre, but what is here is solid enough.

Movement is precise with the ability to adjust jumps to make the platforming a bit more manageable. Add the dash ability and you’re zipping about the area. It’s also useful for reaching the occasional hidden item and gaining access to previously unreachable areas. One issue I had with the platforming was that the rope grab can be a bit inconsistent. This occasionally leaves you in a situation where you’re trying to evade a swarm and you end up missing or catching but not realising and dropping into the fray again. This killed me more often that I’d care to admit – skill issue? Maybe but it was frustrating.

Combat also feels rather simplistic to begin with. You’re provided with a melee weapon and a gun of some type. Different options can be looted from enemies and bosses and come in a variety of rarities. The higher the rarity, the more perks each weapons has. There’s temporary skills that you lose upon death and a multitude of throwables. Weapons can be upgraded to improve all the usual stats, plus you can add elemental effects.

For the amount of skills I had though, I was always happy to close the gap and slash away at whatever was in front of me. But as I made more progress and new enemy types are introduced, it showed a greater depth. Prioritising targets and switching between ranged and melee combat feels intuitive. You also need to balance a stamina bar otherwise you’ll gas out and become easy pickings. Once everything comes together and you start using everything at your fingertips, it feels exceptionally smooth.

Great enemy variety also keeps things fresh and are a mix of sci-fi and fantasy types. There’s the usual slow shambling zombie types. Faster knights with full armour and guns, dragons, wizards… it quite a mix. Each poses a different kind of threat but identifying attack patterns and evading them is pretty straight forward until you get larger groups. Although some enemies can be slow to wind up attacks others can spin on a dime and do significant damage. Take the shields guys for example – just wailing on them does nothing, you’ll need to bait them and get behind them with a well timed roll or, as I found, get a turret out and throw it behind them as you smash away at their shield. If you roll too far though, they’re right in your face again. Getting more than one of these guys or adding in an enemy with range turns into a nightmare as you try to avoid everything whilst chipping away at their health. It’s just a shame that I can’t extend the same fear to the bosses.

There’s an excellent variety of big bads that stand in the way of your progress, but they just aren’t challenging. Maybe this was down to my weapon loadout but I felt like everything went down too easily. Attacks are well telegraphed and avoidable, they’re generally pretty slow, but they do hit hard. Because the attacks are so easy to read, you can use iframes to dodge out the way and get some hits in yourself. Or you can make it simple for yourself and use the gun and add either fire or poison upgrades. Levelling up your weapon and adding elemental effects, and having a boat load of ammo, makes most encounters trivial as you stack damage over time. With arenas being sizeable, keeping distance and just unloading your weapon, then dodging past and repeating the process saw most bosses drop quickly.

There are some nice designs in here though and they do have varied attacks and phases but they were disappointing. Should you meet your end, you’ll drop any temporary upgrades and any currency you haven’t banked – the games equivalent of XP. Like Dark Souls before it, if you get back to your body you can get that XP back. One thing I did like about this system is that you can bump into bankers whilst out in the field. Getting to these guys lets you save any XP you’ve gained and store it for next time you’re back at camp.

The camps are basically work as a hub/social area for each of the games three groups. Here you can do all the usual weapon and character upgrades and speak to some NPCs to move the story forward or get a bit of lore. The portal in each camp also lets you fast travel to any of the others you find in each of the games biomes. These cover your usual dungeon type environments and the classic swamp, but they all have a bit of tech gubbins giving the whole thing a beautiful sci-fi fantasy crossover aesthetic.

In fact the whole game is beautifully presented with a kinda retro style. Parallax scrolling backgrounds and foregrounds give each environment much needed depth and are exceptionally well detailed. Character and enemy models are nicely animated and combat transitions are smooth. Magic and elemental attacks add some flashy effects but there’s nothing over the top taking your attention away from the action. There is a bit of blurring at the edges which gives the same effect as chromatic aberration, it also softens things a touch. Personally, I turned this off and was happier with the cleaner image.

The story, which I have neglected to mention until now is pretty straightforward. Demons have opened a portal and you need to complete various quests for different factions to level up and progress. Each will send you on various tasks like finding a relic, beating a boss or finding a lost NPC. Depending on certain decisions, this leads onto one of the eight endings, so there’s a bit of replayability on offer. Enjoyable enough even if I’ve seen it a million times before but the gameplay more than made up for it.

Dark Light then, is a really well put together action platforming with some lite RPG mechanics. It has a few flaws, but overall the combat and exploration carried it through. It’s not the best I have played in the genre, but I really enjoyed my time with it.

Overall
  • 80%
    CX Score - 80%
80%

Summary

Pros

  • Combat
  • Exploration
  • Presentation

 

Cons

  • Soft bosses
  • Soft finicky platforming

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