Game Reviews

Dark Break

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iOS
| Dark Break
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Dark Break
|
iOS
| Dark Break

There are numerous antiquated genres that have been given a new lease of life on iPhone and iPod touch.

Bullet hell shooters and dungeon crawling role-playing games that were bullied into obscurity by high retail prices and expensive console development costs now live happily on the pocket money App Store.

Dark Break is just such a game, reviving the long dormant on-rails shooter genre popularised by the likes of Panzer Dragoon and Sin & Punishment. While its valiant effort to resuscitate the on-rails shooter should be commended, Dark Break is sadly not much fun.

Oh my god! It’s full of stars!

To begin, the visuals are a constant impediment to any possible enjoyment. The screen is rendered a mess of ugly polygonal enemies and pulsating blue reticules. With your floating character, the hideous pop-up backdrops, numerous enemies, their shots, your shots and an incessantly flickering neon targeting orb, Dark Break is a visual cacophony.

Rather than this chaos lending a certain charm as is true of many bullet hell shooters, it’s simply disorientating. Discerning your bullets from enemy projectiles is tough and the 3D perspective makes it difficult to know what will and won’t harm you.

It goes hand in hand with the game’s disastrous pop-up. Dark Break packs a draw distance so tight that some of the larger enemies, like the venus fly trap-style monsters in the spooky swamp levels, clip in and out of existence when they dart forward and reel back.

Oh, and don’t look at the ground which is endlessly morphing into existence from the fog as it could easily make you car sick. As a motion sickness sufferer, I literally became nauseous playing this game.

Can’t touch this

The feelings of disorientation and confusion aren't helped by the wonky control scheme. Hovering precariously below the virtual joystick is a button to switch between said analogue stick and control via the accelerometer.

Why this is on screen at all times when a perfectly good button appears in the menu is puzzling. Hitting this button accidentally is frustratingly easy and can have disastrous results.

Same goes for the attack button. Holding a finger to the screen fire a constant stream of bullets, but move your digit too far too the right and you start to charge up your gun. It unleashes a powerful attack when used purposefully, but it annoyingly stops your attack when activated accidentally.

Anime dismay

Even if you can decipher whats going on, even if you wrangle with the buttons and don’t feel car sick at most times, Dark Break just isn’t fun.

The targeting system is extremely lenient, enabling you to target and kill enemies with ease by just holding down the fire button for an entire level. In fact, the game is so easy that you just float through stages, holding down the fire button and randomly wiggling the analogue stick. I often got S-rank medals - the highest award available - without even trying.

Fresh ideas crop up all too infrequently, and they never add much sophistication to the game’s bare-bones concept when they do.

And then there are the interstitial comic strip panels. While competently illustrated, they're obnoxiously obsessed with the female form. They consist of little more than gratuitous underwear shots and air-headed babes bursting out of their tiny shirts.

About as deep as your average fan fiction, Dark Break has little entertainment in store for those whose discerning taste craves more than a bad shooter designed as an excuse to show off buxom co-eds.

Dark Break

Dark Break is an uninteresting game made worse by poor visuals, lame controls and one too many perverted drawings
Score
Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer