The poster-child of a deeply troubled game not ready for early access.

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It's bland & repetitive. You spawn in 1 out of 4 predetermined maps (with the possibility of being put into rooms full of hostile NPC's that immediately aggro you, yes really) and your goal is to run around like a headless chicken collecting bent pieces of metal to sell to one of the 12 vendor NPC's and spank any laughably rigid & brain-dead monsters you come across in slow-motion (yes this game is really that slow compared to anything else). If you don't die, you get to bring your loot with you.

"What's wrong with this gameplay loop?" you ask? Well! Since it entirely revolves around you being alive, it's guilty for directly encouraging the most disgusting, ratty, cowardly rule-breaking behavior that players can possibly partake in order to fill that "get out alive" check mark.

This means that people pretty much always avoid player conflicts and in the Steam release this has gotten worse by having the devs remove the shrinking circle (same as BR games) and replaced it with a timer and a bunch of static extraction points. The end result is that they've basically turned the game into a single-player title since it's drastically easier and practically risk-free just looting stuff and then immediately leaving.

But when you DO PVP? Oh boy. The experience of that in this game is equivalent to shoving your junk into a meat-grinder and pouring salt and lemon juice all over them at the same time since the power-gaming players (constituting a majority of the player base) will use every single itty bitty advantage they can think of such as being obscenely cowardly no matter the tedium, material or time investment/cost, teaming, using cheats/exploits/glitches, buying in-game skins for a tangible advantage over you, spending 300 hours studying third party sites & map layouts & data-mining & broken item/spell combos, spinning their characters around like helicopters and/or twitching like spastics in hopes of making you miss, buying in-game gold (RMT) to get better gear than you, camping exits and other disgustingly boring-for-both-sides ratting tactics, being downright spiteful by throwing away their loot before heading into fights just so you won't get it and mountains of other asinine anti-fun immersion-breaking garbage.

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It's clear to me, as someone who's been watching this game and it's turbulent development cycle for a long time that the developers have absolutely no idea what they're doing when it comes to balancing classes and it's been made much worse by them recently creating several new ones for a 3 year long roller-coaster of game-breaking overpowered metas (solos and groups) and literal unusable roles. They even added multi-classing but had to immediately axe it after a few weeks.

One would normally be able to play all the different classes by creating new characters and getting a feel for their strength & weaknesses or simply just switching to whatever's not useless at the moment but the developers in all their wisdom has decided to restrict free-to-play players to a single character slot, blocking you from it. Great!

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Something i can only describe as being a literal dumpsterfire. Are you playing solo? Their own statistics have shown this to be the majority player pool but they thought it'd be really funny if you repeatedly ran into 1v2's or even 1v3 on most maps by using a rotation system that endlessly cycles maps from being solo/duo/trio. It's the most horrid system ever that makes it even harder for new players to learn maps. Why did they add it? I honestly don't know.

"They recently added gear-based stuff for the matchmaking!"

They have done this before and it got immediately abused into oblivion day-1, exactly as it's being done now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxJADdlJpE8

Put on trash gear, maybe 1-2 BiS and go stomp new players for free loot.

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"Well, if the PVP sucks... At least there's good PvE, right?"

Nope. Currently a joke. When i was a brand-spanking new player, It took me a total of about 30 minutes to get 100% comfortable with every common/uncommon mob in the game as they all suffer from predictable & slow & few attack animations (while also having brain-dead pathing AI) that they can't control vertically. Which means you can get to another elevation (sloped terrain, standing on a thing, whatever) or just duck and most of them will never be able to even hit you.. Or just block, that works too. Yes, this means that you can cheese every single enemy in the game if you have any sort of ranged attack, including bosses, even if you're naked.

Room traps are extremely obvious & uninspired with different shaders that makes them stick out like sore thumbs to the point where they might as well be giant glowing red flags (whenever the developer doesn't incessantly put them in 100% pitch-black areas) and you'll learn them all in no time. The only "challenge" PvE-wise is when you face swarms of monsters all running after you freight-train style and then get stuck on their obscenely huge collision boxes trying to open doors because you're trying to go through a room quickly since fighting them is the most boring, repetitive & unrewarding crap ever.

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There's none which should not come as a surprise once you learn that most of the game consists of store-bought assets.

It also currently has no tutorial and 4 very unremarkable & uninspired maps (filled with clipping objects and other rushed mapping errors) and they're all predetermined. The few monster types that inhabit them are recycled to oblivion and they pose no challenge whatsoever except when they are spammed with reckless abandon (which the new ice cavern map does in some places).

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This is a pet peeve of mine and i'm going to try to sum it up for those that haven't played the game yet. Are you ready? Here's the insider look of the melee combat system in Dark and Darker:

M1 to swing your weapon.

M2 to block/parry (Only available if you have shield/longsword).

Extra Tactic: Aim for head.

For a game where you can lose days of grinding in an instant, this is absolutely pathetic.

Every single other combat element of this game outside of this involves spam-buffing yourself with items/spells/abilities right before engaging, not engaging at all or running away while throwing your ranged junk at people. That's it. Class matchups are rock-paper-scissors and similarly have no depth. They are always going to end the same way unless there's extreme & rare circumstances.

Spellcasters aren't given any tools to do creative things like in D&D. Melee classes have no way of utilizing their reaction time & skill to reliably come out on top. Rogues are the only exception in that they can go completely invisible and one-shot people immediately if they have the right gear, which is technically more akin to seal clubbing rather than combat.

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The game gathers your data and sends it back to various cloud services located in Seoul. They also use Epic Game Store API functions to gather your data without permission.

Additionally, the developers have introduced "skins" or races that give tangible stat advantages and you either have to extract hundreds of times to get one or cough up some money to get them instantly. There's several skins that can no longer be acquired and some you can only buy with IRL money that are better (Darker hues).

They have also disabled the ability for F2P's to sell things on the auction house. This means that if you find some really good stuff, you can't actually profit from it.

Community is as you may have guessed, absurdly toxic. Just look at the community reward this and other negative reviews get for leaving valid criticism.

The poster-child of a deeply troubled game not ready for early access. [hr][/hr] [h1]1. Gameplay Loop.[/h1] It's bland & repetitive. You spawn in 1 out of 4 predetermined maps (with the possibility of being put into rooms full of hostile NPC's that immediately aggro you, yes really) and your goal is to run around like a headless chicken collecting bent pieces of metal to sell to one of the 12 vendor NPC's and spank any laughably rigid & brain-dead monsters you come across in slow-motion (yes this game is really that slow compared to anything else). If you don't die, you get to bring your loot with you. "What's wrong with this gameplay loop?" you ask? Well! Since it entirely revolves around you being alive, it's guilty for directly encouraging the most disgusting, ratty, cowardly rule-breaking behavior that players can possibly partake in order to fill that "get out alive" check mark. This means that people pretty much always avoid player conflicts and in the Steam release this has gotten worse by having the devs remove the shrinking circle (same as BR games) and replaced it with a timer and a bunch of static extraction points. The end result is that they've basically turned the game into a single-player title since it's drastically easier and practically risk-free just looting stuff and then immediately leaving. But when you DO PVP? Oh boy. The experience of that in this game is equivalent to shoving your junk into a meat-grinder and pouring salt and lemon juice all over them at the same time since the power-gaming players (constituting a majority of the player base) will use every single itty bitty advantage they can think of such as being obscenely cowardly no matter the tedium, material or time investment/cost, teaming, using cheats/exploits/glitches, buying in-game skins for a tangible advantage over you, spending 300 hours studying third party sites & map layouts & data-mining & broken item/spell combos, spinning their characters around like helicopters and/or twitching like spastics in hopes of making you miss, buying in-game gold (RMT) to get better gear than you, camping exits and other disgustingly boring-for-both-sides ratting tactics, being downright spiteful by throwing away their loot before heading into fights just so you won't get it and mountains of other asinine anti-fun immersion-breaking garbage. [hr][/hr] [h1]2. Class Balance.[/h1] It's clear to me, as someone who's been watching this game and it's turbulent development cycle for a long time that the developers have absolutely no idea what they're doing when it comes to balancing classes and it's been made much worse by them recently creating several new ones for a 3 year long roller-coaster of game-breaking overpowered metas (solos and groups) and literal unusable roles. They even added multi-classing but had to immediately axe it after a few weeks. One would normally be able to play all the different classes by creating new characters and getting a feel for their strength & weaknesses or simply just switching to whatever's not useless at the moment but the developers in all their wisdom has decided to restrict free-to-play players to a single character slot, blocking you from it. Great! [hr][/hr] [h1]3. Matchmaking.[/h1] Something i can only describe as being a literal dumpsterfire. Are you playing solo? Their own statistics have shown this to be the majority player pool but they thought it'd be really funny if you repeatedly ran into 1v2's or even 1v3 on most maps by using a rotation system that endlessly cycles maps from being solo/duo/trio. It's the most horrid system ever that makes it even harder for new players to learn maps. Why did they add it? [b]I honestly don't know.[/b] "They recently added gear-based stuff for the matchmaking!" They have done this before and it got immediately abused into oblivion day-1, exactly as it's being done now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxJADdlJpE8 Put on trash gear, maybe 1-2 BiS and go stomp new players for free loot. [hr][/hr] [h1]4. PvE.[/h1] "Well, if the PVP sucks... At least there's good PvE, right?" Nope. Currently a joke. When i was a brand-spanking new player, It took me a total of about 30 minutes to get 100% comfortable with every common/uncommon mob in the game as they all suffer from predictable & slow & few attack animations (while also having brain-dead pathing AI) that they can't control vertically. Which means you can get to another elevation (sloped terrain, standing on a thing, whatever) or just duck and most of them will never be able to even hit you.. Or just block, that works too. Yes, this means that you can cheese every single enemy in the game if you have any sort of ranged attack, including bosses, even if you're naked. Room traps are extremely obvious & uninspired with different shaders that makes them stick out like sore thumbs to the point where they might as well be giant glowing red flags (whenever the developer doesn't incessantly put them in 100% pitch-black areas) and you'll learn them all in no time. The only "challenge" PvE-wise is when you face swarms of monsters all running after you freight-train style and then get stuck on their obscenely huge collision boxes trying to open doors because you're trying to go through a room quickly since fighting them is the most boring, repetitive & unrewarding crap ever. [hr][/hr] [h1]5. Content.[/h1] There's none which should not come as a surprise once you learn that most of the game consists of store-bought assets. It also currently has no tutorial and 4 very unremarkable & uninspired maps (filled with clipping objects and other rushed mapping errors) and they're all predetermined. The few monster types that inhabit them are recycled to oblivion and they pose no challenge whatsoever except when they are spammed with reckless abandon (which the new ice cavern map does in some places). [hr][/hr] [h1]6. Melee Combat Depth.[/h1] This is a pet peeve of mine and i'm going to try to sum it up for those that haven't played the game yet. Are you ready? Here's the insider look of the melee combat system in Dark and Darker: M1 to swing your weapon. M2 to block/parry (Only available if you have shield/longsword). Extra Tactic: Aim for head. For a game where you can lose days of grinding in an instant, this is absolutely pathetic. Every single other combat element of this game outside of this involves spam-buffing yourself with items/spells/abilities right before engaging, not engaging at all or running away while throwing your ranged junk at people. That's it. Class matchups are rock-paper-scissors and similarly have no depth. They are always going to end the same way unless there's extreme & rare circumstances. Spellcasters aren't given any tools to do creative things like in D&D. Melee classes have no way of utilizing their reaction time & skill to reliably come out on top. Rogues are the only exception in that they can go completely invisible and one-shot people immediately if they have the right gear, which is technically more akin to seal clubbing rather than combat. [hr][/hr] [h1]7. Miscellaneous.[/h1] The game gathers your data and sends it back to various cloud services located in Seoul. They also use Epic Game Store API functions to gather your data without permission. Additionally, the developers have introduced "skins" or races that give tangible stat advantages and you either have to extract hundreds of times to get one or cough up some money to get them instantly. There's several skins that can no longer be acquired and some you can only buy with IRL money that are better (Darker hues). They have also disabled the ability for F2P's to sell things on the auction house. This means that if you find some really good stuff, you can't actually profit from it. Community is as you may have guessed, absurdly toxic. Just look at the community reward this and other negative reviews get for leaving valid criticism.