Dusktreaders
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| Dusktreaders

Dusktreaders is designed to scare you witless. Skeletons, zombies, and werewolves patrol the levels, clawing at you whenever you walk within reach. There's something pretty frightening about Dusktreaders, but its zombies aren't the cause - the game itself is.

Subjecting you to an onslaught of monsters, the game chronicles your escape from the town of New Hexborough. Exploring the game's five sparse levels is done in the first-person, the accelerometer letting you move about.

Describing Dusktreaders as a first-person shooter would be very generous, though, given that many of the levels don't require you to shoot anyone and even those that do come with one, sole target.

With a clock ticking down, you're charged with different objectives each level. The goal is never all that imaginative, usually tasking you to escape the area or slay a particular beast before the clock reaches zero.

Finding that creature can take a fair amount of time and when you do, slaying it is an odd procedure. Dusktreaders comes with a short supply of weapons - just a gun and a sword, with ammunition severely restricted for the former. Not that it matters because you never actually see the effect it has on your foe: there's no visible effect for attacks.

Using your weapons is simply a matter of tapping the 'attack' button in the corner of the screen, though you're hard pressed to know whether it's working or not.

Even when an enemy has been dispatched, the only notification you have that they're no longer there is that, well, they're no longer there. That might sound like a logical way of dealing with things, but when enemies just disappear from the screen it's rather startling.

That's not accounting for the fact that play often runs far from smoothly in the first place. Dusktreaders's 3D levels are some of the most basic to grace the iPhone, crawling along at a snail's pace.

Combine this with the fact that you're tipping the phone to move in the first place - not to mention that most of the game takes place is dark, dank settings - and you end up having a difficult time see what you're doing, who you're doing it to, and why you're doing it in the first place.

Though unlikely to have been Granite Games's intention, this is a game that's been released before it's had a chance to be a game in the first place. It feels broken, it feels rushed, and ultimately, it feels pointless.

While the concept - of creating a first-person game that focuses on exploration rather than shooting - could be a valid one, Dusktreaders's locations are so plain and featureless that there's nothing you'd want to explore in the first place, even if slowdown wasn't a chain around its neck.

To be fairly frank, Dusktreaders is the kind of title that should never have made it onto the App Store in its current state. Even at its very moderate price, this is the kind of chaff that will put gamers off taking a punt on something new, something different.

While the focus of a lot of Dusktreaders's play is escaping from its clutches, the best way to get out of this hell is not to go there in the first place.

Dusktreaders

Like a tech demo gone wrong, Dusktreaders is a botched attempt at first-person adventuring that is as slow as it is pointless
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Keith Andrew
Keith Andrew
With a fine eye for detail, Keith Andrew is fuelled by strong coffee, Kylie Minogue and the shapely curve of a san serif font. He's also Pocket Gamer's resident football gaming expert and, thanks to his work on PG.biz, monitors the market share of all mobile OSes on a daily basis.