Came for the shooting, stayed for the chill tracks to shoot ayylmaos to. DarkenDerek is a game that is just fun enough, some kind of gem you will find perfectly enjoyable but not anywhere near diamond status. It's more like topaz, or amethyst. The voice acting and jankiness you see right off of the bat in the opening cutscene set the tone for an experience that is just silly and stupid enough to entertain rather than annoy. The gunplay, in my opinion, Just Works in fashionable 90s style: enemies take a predictable amount of hits and die, and hitting them depends on your aim. It threw me off for a bit at first that enemies have rather lazy death animations, they sort of stop for a moment and vaporize into particles rather than giving you more feedback like falling over, or being thrown by force of lead or explosions, you get the picture. Once you realize this you'll be okay but before that you'll probably be wasting ammo thinking an enemy isn't dead yet.
This is the top of the hill for the snowball of problems in this game I want to mention. I didn't know how to pause from the outset because pausing isn't mapped to Escape (it's actually P) and literally no English speaker is going to see "Commands" in any menu and associate that with "Controls" (I and others are more likely to think of console commands, or maybe cheat codes.) Level design is okay for the most part but there are some significant dips in judgment throughout the game that bring the experience down from great to good. The first level is great. The second level is great. The third level we see some falloff in enjoyment because it establishes a common pattern you're going to see in quite a few levels going forward: you're going to bluescreen a computer station by getting close (much like hitting a switch in Doom) and it's going to activate something somewhere the game will give you no indication of or hint towards. (This level also has you use an infinite jetpack to navigate the world, something I didn't realize I could do at first but that's a me problem. On the subject of the jetpack though, how come it was only a feature in the first (finite) and third (infinite) levels and then never used again in the game anywhere else?)
The fifth level intensifies the switch problem by having you hit one then reconnoiter the rest of a decently sized box of a level to see what changed. It's not too bad given you have only so much level to explore here, but it is tedious. And things only get worse from there. The second chapter's worth of maps in particular are horrendous and maze-like (on purpose!) You will be wandering through samey hallways wondering what you can do, what's opened up after a switch is hit, which doors actually react, or what's actually a door (this last one is mostly a problem on level 6, the other levels after don't have confusing doors thankfully.) It's a problem when there are several straight minutes of the player not finding new monsters to kill, which are your only hope of salvation for finding where you have and haven't been yet in the confusing hallways of the spaceships. The last chapter of the game opens back up and lets you see where you're going and will drop down to but the second chapter is the big black mark to me. It's just terrible level design. The theater level is another annoying switch hunt much like the third level but with the distinct disadvantage of being twice the size and having to wait for elevators (and if you fall down an elevator shaft that's an instant loss of life.)
Beyond all of that, what follows 14 levels of relatively low intensity alien blasting is a giant slaughter arena with infinitely spawning mooks that will definitely test player skill. This is not a bad thing, per se, but I understand it may not be what some players are looking for, especially when the rest of the game plays like kill a set number of monsters and escape. The game's difficulty starts at Baby (easy), but I chose to play at Prince (normal) difficulty, so that may have affected the amount of monsters in the arena, didn't test. Mostly it's level 15 that will test a player's endurance, as you must kill all 14 "bosses" you have seen throughout the rest of the game one by one (they have somewhat reduced health so they aren't too horrible) while dealing with many, MANY other threats at the same time, with priority on those bosses. Once the bosses die, you win. But this is definitely tough to do without dying, general knowledge of the item layout in the arena, and having a strategy in mind for wrecking them each quickly, so you will definitely need more than one attempt at the level to get the job done. It's a huge jump in the gameplay aesthetic, almost like whiplash - we jump from Duke Nukem tier to Serious Sam right there at the end of the game. Just a warning.
And lastly, I want to mention the music. I already mentioned it at the beginning, but it needs mentioning again. Whoever Davide Capello is, he's an alright composer in my book. I didn't even expect that the chill vibes of the music in the game would mesh so well with the gameplay as an active improvement but it did. It's what kept me going even when I felt some of the game was overbearing and giving me a headache with "where do I go next" syndrome. It's just that good, believe me. It sure made it worth it for me to soldier on to the end, where the fact that the arena is constantly muffling the music with enemy gunfire hurts this point a bit but hey, the first 14 levels of the game backed that up pretty good. I recommend this game if any of the points I've mentioned at all above don't rub you the wrong way, because this game is a gem. A rough, uncut gem, but still a gem.
