Dark Mist review (PS3)

You’re probably still tied up with the extra levels released for the excellent PixelJunk Monsters Encore pack last Thursday, so perhaps you didn’t notice the arrival of the brand new PSN game to grace our servers, Dark Mist. For a swift fiver you can grab the game, but it was perhaps the lack of information about it that made me step up to the mark and volunteer to review it.

Dark Mist starts with a quick text based story intro that is summed up by explaining that ‘Evil’ has come to earth, and you’re the powerful Light warrior Artemis, revived from stone to purge a temple of the Darkness again. 12 stages (including three boss levels) populate the dungeons, made up of multiple single screen areas, and you’ll have to work your way down through them all to complete the game.

Why’s it called…

Encircled by a pretty HUD, the stylishly fantasy levels all look pretty great with a few different styles and themes. Populated by a swarm of varying evil creatures (that all share the same basic designs but vary a lot in their structure) you must defeat them, find keys to open locked pathways and generally wipe out the titular Mist.

Most stages are filled or at least liberally scattered with the well realised ever growing and shifting black stuff, seeping around and covering the area. Enemies under the mist are generally hidden from view, and should you move into it, what you can see is heavily limited. A quick sixaxis enabled flick of the control pad will cause Artemis to perform an impressive spinning melee attack which also gets rid of any mist close by, but the majority of your attacks will be through your Bow of Light.

It’s a dual stick shooter, isn’t it?

Essentially you’ve got a fast shooting autofire weapon in the Bow that will generally make short work of your enemies. Your default control scheme lets you fire in the direction you are looking, but my favourite and in my opinion the easiest is the alternate system that controls like one of the many shooters we’ve seen on the PSN where the left stick moves your character and the right stick fires your weapon in the direction you push, allowing you to run away while firing backwards.

Your Bow can also be set to three modes that have no specific effect on your standard firepower, but allow different specials to be used depending on the mode you are in. The green mode allows a kind of spread shot special that can hit multiple enemies, the blue mode arcs a projectile upwards and any creature that it lands on will be damaged multiple times, while the red special allows you to ricochet it off walls. Extremely quickly recharging, these specials can be used whenever you deem fit, and as you collect moon symbols a bar rises that when full adds an extra use before recharging, depending on which mode you have selected. Finally you have two bombs per dungeon level that will heavily damage everything on screen for those especially tight spots, though using them will decrease the amount of points you gain at the end of the stage.

Quality of performance over simply finishing the level

Your health is kept by three stars in the HUD, regained by picking up liberally scattered hearts and grown up to a maximum of five by defeating each of the bosses. Playing through the game the first time I didn’t feel particularly worried about dying if I took my time and gradually chipped away at the enemies, but that doesn’t seem to be the point of the game. Indeed if you do die you can restart at the beginning of the dungeon level that you are on, ad infinitum, but unfortunately can never save your game, insisting that you go through the game all at once.

Fortunately (or unfortunately in terms of value) the game doesn’t last too long. I managed to get through my first play through in just over 95 minutes, and it has been done in well under an hour according to the top of the leaderboards, although I seemed to spend an age on the suddenly very difficult end boss. Once you’ve finished the game you’ll unlock a couple of extras; hard mode (not looking forward to reaching the boss in that one) that throws a lot more enemies at you, a Time Attack mode that lets you attempt individual dungeons to beat your time, a Hunting mode that challenges you to defeat as many monsters as possible within the time limit, and a strangely addictive Endless mode that just sees how many single screen levels you can defeat before succumbing to waves of enemies or monotony.

Where did that come from?

The sound deserves a special mention for its enhanced use of positional sound and pleasant music tracks, and general sound effects for the action taking place. To keep challenging you, different types of enemies are gradually revealed with ever increasing techniques of defeating you, and then an alternate version of each one will appear in a yellow coloured version to make things a little harder by upping the damage they can take and refining their skills.

Ultimately the game does provide an addictive challenge that doesn’t focus on an elaborate story, but expects you to grind away at the game to defeat your own performances and improve your skills. While the first play through seems short, it is certainly replayable with the unlockable modes (as long as you don’t give up at the end boss and have to do it all over again) and online leader boards, but having been out in Japan for quite a while it seems unlikely for me to ever have a hope of reaching the top echelons of the boards. Do I care? Not really; for me it’s about the frantic action and well designed if simplistic stages, and for a fiver, I’m happy to have the challenge of Hard Mode to slog through next.