Darkest Hunters

Genre: Match-3 Puzzle / Top-Down Dungeon Crawler / RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Darkest Hunters is a Puzzle game with Match-3 elements combined with a Dungeon Crawler-style RPG. Dungeons are filled with life, attack, magic, and gold tiles, and can move across as many of one type of tile as they can string together, gathering together that resource and making combos to set up magical bomb tiles to act as a trap of sorts for enemies.

I absolutely love this concept, as it makes for a really refreshing approach to the Dungeon Crawler genre, placing a whole new emphasis on thinking through how you move. However, the game has its fair share of problems.

First, the tutorial here isn’t very good, and there doesn’t appear to be any way to revisit it without restarting the game. The interface is awkward and confusing at the best of times… and this game rarely gives you the best of times. In should, playing this game with a controller is terrible, with the menus not responding properly, and sometimes even freezing up and refusing to accept your inputs. In battle, when you move the cursor around, it moves as slow as molasses. Just overall, playing this game with a controller is an agonizing, tedious experience.

With a touchscreen, though? Not so bad, though you’ll likely want to play with a combination of the two, since the icon to close a menu box is so tiny that it’s buch easier to hit a button to exit out.

Graphically, this game does nothing particularly special, although it’s interesting that it presents more or less typical match-3 puzzle tiles in a top-down dungeon layout – that in itself gives this game a distinct look. However, beyond that there’s nothing particularly memorable going on here, save for an odd graphical glitch that happens every now and then and makes it look like the screen is tearing.

I was really torn on Darkest Hunters. On the one hand, the gameplay here has so much potential, and I really like its approach to combining these genres. On the other hand, it is a game that you will pretty much only want to play in portable mode because the game’s interface is such a nightmare. And even then, it’s clunky and has a terrible tutorial. If you’re looking for an interesting blend of Puzzle and Dungeon Crawler to play on the go, this game might be worth looking into, but otherwise I’d say to skip this one – its flaws make it a difficult game to love.

tl;dr – Darkest Hunters is a game that combines Match-3-style Puzzle gameplay with Dungeon Crawler-style RPG gameplay in a way that’s inspired, original, and ultimately crippled by horrible interface issues and a terrible tutorial. Fans of these genres looking to play something fairly unique may want to give it a try, but be warned that you’ll probably only want to play this in portable mode due to the terrible interface problems this game has with a controller.

Grade: C

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