DARK FACETS Reviews

This. Game. Sucks.

Game unbalanced af, AI get infinite resources and sabo doesnt do anything expect like 3% damage to mines which they repair 30 seconds later

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away"- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This game is, thus, just about perfect. It feels like one of those tower defense games from a dozen years ago, or maybe one of those games from the eighties where the ideas of the writers far exceeded the capability of the gameplay and graphics (like Might and Magic: Book One), or maybe a demo that comes on the cd of a full game (fun, but it leaves you wishing for more than what the limited experience provides), or maybe that one poorly-translated foreign game with a strangely-intricate storyline you got from a garage sale twenty years ago that you wish you still had so you could explain to people why you like to pretend "funceame" is a real word. Alright, alright, I'll start talking about the game directly. There are resources, generated by specific buildings but only when they have people in them. People and buildings cost resources. Those people who don't go into buildings go to the right side of the screen to destroy the enemy's buildings and people. Upgrading your main building lets you get more soldiers, and different soldiers, and then, near the end, battering rams. Sometimes you are able to trade resources for other resources, and one of the resources allows you to cast spells. You can also speed up the game (which is a feature that far more games should have). Sure, Warlords Battlecry 3 this ain't, but everything's got to start somewhere, and if Might and Magic Book One can lead to Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and 3, and if the original Bloons Tower Defense can lead to BTD4, BTD5, and BTD6, then I'd really like to see where this could go and what Oluin makes next. There's some solid understanding of what makes a game fun and addicting here, and the nuances of what types of soldiers to send, how many, and when, have more depth than you'd expect. The in-game story, as given through screens of text at the end of levels, provides a sense of progression and meaning to what would otherwise be a bunch of rather similar levels, and the in-game map lets you make long-term investments that are reflected in small in-level bonuses, which adds to the feeling of progression. There are story decisions you can make, which is neat. I've seen worse stories and less interesting worlds in games that I've genuinely enjoyed. The worst and best I can say about this game in general is this: I wish the ideas here were more developed and could be used as the basis for something bigger, with a larger budget and a design crew of more than one. Oh wait, the cost! I'd complain about the cost of the game relative to the amount of content, but I've bought games from Paradox and some dlcs for those games, so that would be hypocritical. Those games are about as far from perfection as you can get.

I was expecting Dark facets to be similar to the old flash games like Age of War or Stick Wars; And it was! Only much more boring. Age of war and Stick Wars had a fairly fast play style, but dark facets is incredibly slow paced. It takes a long time for resources to gather, a long time for units to march, longer to kill enemy units, even longer for your units to chip away at an enemy building. Then they just have to move to the second building (Of five). It feels less like i'm playing a game, more like watching a series of gifs that i switch between occasionally. The game works as is, but a single mission takes forty minutes to complete and you are just waiting the whole time. If the developers just sped everything up it'll be just fine. Yeah, the missions are very repetitive (pretty much the same mission, but the AI has a little more advantage each time); but that's easy to ignore.