Guild of Darksteel

"Guild of Darksteel" is a good game for a single evening: mechanically it copies the old "Prince of Persia", while adding simple progression system, fighting combos, a linear dark plot, and bleak graphics to match the narrative.

They need to fix the controls and give you a way to map them properly. After I close the game all controls reset. The first time I go to change the controls it allows me to select with my mouse. After I leave, the mouse no longer works. What happens every time I press the R key? There is a description of the armor and then it kicks you back into the menu. This can cause you to lose all unsaved progress. There is no option to fix the keybind on it. There is no option to change sound settings or lower the music volume. In its current state with the preset keybinds the game is unplayable for me. One more small annoyance is that the New Game button is always on the top in the menu and the first thing selected. Meaning you can accidentally press it and wipe your progress if you were to save at the shrine on load. About 30% of all people who have played the game have not even gotten the first achievement. Which happens within the first 5 minutes of gameplay. If the devs could fix or patch this I will change my review because then I would be capable of playing the game.

I can't in good faith recommend this game to anyone at the current price tag. Played the game from start to finish in one go, takes about 3-4 hours even while unlocking all the achievements, which are bugged by the way so you may or may not unlock them all, not to mention the achievements pretty much contain spoilers. I'll mention the two positives first before we move onto the problems this game suffers from; the pixel art is solid, and I genuinely took an interest in the world and its history early on. Now for the negatives, which far outweigh the positives unfortunately, and we'll stick to the main ones else this review will get too lengthy. The story had me intrigued initially, and it's really the only thing that'll keep you playing until the end if you can bring yourself to do so, but I was disappointed by how it all wrapped up. A lot of potential in the build-up, but the payoff just didn't feel good at all. Combat is what caught my eye about this game, but it's just far too shallow and repetitive, with badly thought out mechanics. Movement is also very limited and one of the first things that'll immediately tip you off on this game being quite rough. Climbing ledges is clunky, while dropping from them looks clunky. I think there were maybe 2 music tracks in the entire game? One for the settlement, and one for combat. I actually liked the music, it took me back to my GameBoy Advance JRPG days, and it's a shame there just wasn't more of that. It's a damn shame because there's just a bunch of wasted potential here, it could have been a short but sweet experience, and instead Guild of Darksteel is an overpriced candle which not only doesn't burn for very long, but doesn't even burn all that bright either. Wait for a deep, deep discount, or just skip this one entirely if I were you.

Alright ... Pros - Nice Graphics - Decent worldbuilding Cons - Everything else really Guild of Darksteel feels more like a rough draft than an actual finished product. The graphics are really the only plus for me. They're pretty well-made and fit the dark tone of the game, but there's definitely too narrow of a color palette for my liking. The worldbuilding is nice, but the game is so short (2-4 hrs) that any intrigue it has doesn't get much time to be built up or built upon. All of the characters also feel pretty one-dimensional with none of their motivations really being conveyed all that well. Then we get to the gameplay, which I can only describe as boring and tedious. During combat you are locked in place and can only attack or block. Every enemy has a different cycle of attacking and blocking that they do. And by cycle, I mean it, each enemy only has one attack cycle that is the same every time. Then with only 8 enemy types, you'll learn them in no time, and not even the final boss escapes this fate of repetitiveness. The combo system sounds like it would be fun, but it doesn't feel like it was developed around. It's pretty shallow and most of the time you'll just be spamming your strongest combo during the enemy's idle time. Leveling up your combos feels a little too easy and random, but with how dull the combat is, getting over it faster is kind of a plus. There's also a gold counter that really doesn't do anything throughout the game. Lastly, the text wasn't proofread very well. There are a lot of little grammatical errors. There even appears to be an error in the descriptions of the 2nd and 3rd combos you get. They say they buff the next combo of the opposite type, but the indicator that is displayed afterwards is for the same type. There's also some weird clipping issues and bugs, especially with regards to the achievements. All in all, definitely not worth it at full price. Maybe $3 or $4 at most.

Has an interesting setup with darksteel making the wielders immortal, with some good consequences. Music is alright, art style is neat. But the gameplay is just repetitive, multiple screens of caves filled with bats and bandits, where you have to defend, then counterattack by imputting strings of attacks, using two buttons. If you miss and end up dying, everyone respawns, and you have to restart the section, which just makes the boredom even worse. It's a very resounding no from me. Simplicity is good, and there are good simple games, but Guild of Darksteel is so boring in its repetitiveness that my mind just goes blank after a few minutes.

Guild of Darksteel propose une expérience modeste mais plutôt cool. L'ambiance sombre, le setup scénaristique intéressant et le gameplay simple mais efficace font bien le job. Même si l'histoire et son développement ne sont pas d'une folle originalité, on s'y prend notamment grâce aux personnages et quelques touches d'humour bien senties. Le gameplay est étonnant au départ, on est vraiment sur un jeu de rythme plus que d'action, mais c'est réussi. Deux défauts à ce système, à mon sens : certaines indications visuelles ne sont pas très claire (notamment un indicateur couleur qui a l'air clairement faux) et peut-être trop de combats aux ennemis trop faibles. J'aurais préféré des rencontres moins fréquentes mais plus longues pour mettre à profit les combos. Ca reste un bon titre que je recommande. :)

Tldr: Decent Game, impressive for a solo dev, buy at a discount (3€ seems worth it) Guild of Darksteel is a short, story-driven game with combat that is technically real time but works more in a turnbased style in reality. It has a very nice pixelart style and smooth animations for both the character and the enemies. The story is pretty basic, but the tidbits of worldbuilding thrown you way make it a lot more intersting. Characters are pretty shallow but left me wanting more, which does point to a certain level of skill on the part of the Dev. The sound design and soundtrack are decent, nothing special but definetly not bad. My biggest gripe are the monotony and level design. There are 5 types of enemies in the entire game (6 if you count the final boss) and their patterns are extremely easy to learn and abuse. This would not be as monotonous if the level design did not force you to fight through a dozen unavoidable enemies to get to the next dialoge piece. And if you miss something at the start of the area, you have to do the way back to the start and return to where you were. Of course all enemies are reset both ways. I finished this game in about 2,5 hours (3,6 are shown because I made dinner) and I was bored out of my skull for roughly 50% of it. Overall, I still liked this game, and I will always respect Solo Devs trying to do interesting game concepts. I will definetly check out their next game! Final Rating 6/10 (with 5 being average) Edit: 2 of the achievements are bugged which is very annoying. Edit 2: Multiple typos

Prince of Persia-like platforming with rhythm based combat. Great story, several characters you can interact with and surprisingly nice art. The list of combat moves is very limited and you’ll be repeating them a lot, might even get tedious towards the end. Dungeons are linear with dead ends that hide absolutely nothing. Warning if you’re an achievement hunter: two achievements towards the end are broken; it looks like they’re never getting fixed. It’s getting ridiculous that it’s always the last few achievements that are broken.

Guild of Darksteel is one of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam. In this case a lot of work went into polishing the pig, or putting lipstick on it or whatever, as the assets in the game don't appear to be flipped and there's some depth in the gameplay. The game features platforming, hack and slash, inventory management and lightweight RPG elements as well as a modestly fleshed out story. Unfortunately this effort is all wasted on a lacklustre technical implementation that falls below acceptable standards. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. Guild of Darksteel has a laughable, eye watering price of $13 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games, let alone the sheer number of free games available on Steam. Given the defects and shortcomings, it's impossible to recommend this.

I would definitely recommend Guild of Darksteel, though mainly it's because the game is a unique experience. It's short, repetitive, and has a fairly standard fantasy plot. However, the art, music, and setting are all well done, and the gameplay has some things going for it. It sort of feels like the original Prince of Persia, though you can't actually jump, and there's no real platforming. The basic progression is moving through a dungeon while encountering enemies. Bumping into one puts you in Battle Mode (also kind of like Prince of Persia), where you use button combos to attack and another button to defend. It creates a fun little back-and forth fight with each enemy. However, the combat winds up being fairly shallow. Every enemy type has the same attack and defense pattern, with colored variants mixing up the timing a bit. However, there are only 6 types of enemies in the whole game, 10 if you count palette-swaps. It's fun the first few times you fight a new variant, but gets a little old doing the same pattern in combat over and over again. Still, I had fun with Guild of Darksteel, and at around 3 hours, the repetition doesn't drag it down too much. If you can pick this up for $5 or less, I would consider it a worthwhile use of your time and money, just to play a game that's trying to do something a bit outside the norm.