Damm, this is done with love, sport! Terrific homage to 90s FPS xploitation. It's a no brainer! We need more of this...you don't need amazing graphics all the time, you just need to overkill your FPS proposal, with love and tender care, like these guys did with TURBO OVERKILL. BUY IT!
It's not expensive... you simply cannot afford it! Which is different. By the way, don't believe anything haters say, check it for yourself... go to YouTube and compare DarkXL with this, and you'll quickly notice how superior this version is. I've been personally waiting for this for a decade now! The only thing I regret is that there is no (so far) physical version of the game with one of the best artworks ever made for a video game!
I was 15 years old when a friend of my dad's came to my house. He brought a 7-CD video game called Phantasmagoria. Ever since that day, FMV (Full Motion Video) games have held a special place in my heart! I played all of them with the same fascination a child might have while secretly watching porn, experiencing a mix of pleasure and guilt. But there was one FMV game that entered my life in a completely illicit manner: Harvester. Back then, nobody cared about it. I stumbled upon it at a videogame convention, sitting alone in a dusty box alongside numerous cheap CDs that nobody seemed interested in. It was priced at $10 or so, but the box's artwork, featuring Mr. Death himself with a bloody title, captured my attention. I couldn't resist the temptation. Bad Mojo was there two...like $5 cheaper! I knew it was cheesy, but I had to have it, so I bought it. Today, that very same game is valued at around $200 and is difficult to find. It's fascinating how things have turned out for one of the weirdest and most savage games you can find out there, something we couldn't even imagine back then and even less today. 25 years later, it remains playable, and its message is more relevant than ever. It's a brutal and politically charged game, and by today's standards, it's shockingly violent and impossible. I've never managed to complete it, and I sold it for a meager price, but today, it has become a legend, reflecting the world we live in. If you can find it, buy it, play it, and understand its message. That's all I can say. I believe today it is even more pertinent than ever, and here's the message it conveys: "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." I hope some day, somebody remaster it in HD, it well deserves it!
...and yet I still see a margin for improvement. Don't get me wrong, this is ludicrous! BUT...honestly speaking who cares about 4K, 144hz, etc etc....if the game still looks the same? I was not expecting a remake, but I was definitely expecting something more like what we see nowadays with classic DooM mods. Anyway...if you know the game and you played it during the 90s, go for it! This is the best version so far.
But it is so unfair, so dated, so carelessly designed....that I could not! Don't judge me wrong, the game is beautiful: 2d design and graphs are cool, music is awesome, but to be honest, it lacks so many quality-of-life elements that even D1 and Baldur's Gate already had implemented...it totally doesn't worth your time to make any attempt to play it. Do you want to dedicate lots of time to killing the tiniest enemy on the map? Do you want to die and reload the previously saved game constantly? Do you want to walk the entire map from one place to another back and forth because there are no portals? Do you want to break your head to understand why the priest cannot use spells and use swords and daggers instead, totally sucking at those? Do you want to read endlessly conversations that are just "okey (I guess)"? Well....if you answered yes...then it's your came. Don't say we didn't warn you!
It took me a while to play this. It's one of those games I used to be (when I was a teen) captivated by the box artwork that I never had the chance to put my hands on it. I'm an FMV nostalgic lover, a point-and-click classic player, and a hardcore fan of FPS...born in the 80s...so yeah, this one had to be played some day. I did several attempts during past years, but the very bad controls and low res of the game stopped me from achieving that goal. It took me quite some time of doing some research to have better resolution and binding control and finally, I accomplished one of my childhood guilty pleasures. So, if you have the patience to tune up the game a little bit I promise you you will be heading towards an amazing atmospheric experience though a game that today would be impossible to put on the market. It is a very special adventure, with a very nice story, very well told and with a tremendous effort to make you feel alone and scared just with a bunch of pixels. I enjoyed every second of it!
Ok, it's Blade, so it's good! And let's not forget the orginal had already some flaws that you can still experience in here, BUT I have to add my opinion on this about what a GOOD (not awesome) job would have required for a tremendous masterpiece like this. I'm talking about the minimums in here! - GAMEPAD compatability: WTF?! Really?! This was the most important by far! This type of games demand to be played with gamepad. Back then gamepads on PC where not very extended, but today? - VISUALS: How come nobody bothered to AT LEAST improve the textures! Come on! Is it so hard to do that? There's even mods doing this already! - GLICHES: Of all kind...like the intro moving sluggishly...etc etc...that already happened on the original one in many builds, but not in others....was it so hard to fix this? Anyway, I'll buy it for LOVE about what it was and what it represented to my country.
How a "remake" that could have been good enough and respectful with original turned up to be a total waste of time and money. Summary: - Constant crashes: You'll expend more hours re-launching the game after a crash than playing it. - Very bad perfomance: How come, 8 years later, with a Ryzen 3600x and a RTX 3700, this game has still constant frame drops? With all that, you simply cannot finish the game like it happened to me: I've been trying, since 2013, in 3 different computers already...but it's impossible. I will have to uninstall it again...
