Game Reviews

Dark Hill

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Dark Hill
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| Dark Hill

Just about every great horror film has a great score to match. Think of Jaws, The Exorcist or Psycho and you're just as likely to conjure up their iconic sounds as their famous sights. It just goes to show that audio is of key importance in any good scare.

Dark Hill doesn’t do too badly on this front. It has a menacing orchestral soundtrack, eerie sound effects, and plenty of mangled cries incited by mutated monstrosities. The sound of disappointment, however, is much scarier in this underwhelming survival-horror wannabe.

The game plops you in the town of Dark Hill following an unexplained attack by monsters that left everyone but you dead. Escape is your only option, flicks of twin digital analogue sticks enabling your to make your way through the bloodied town.

The left one moves you around the environment, while the right controls your aim. Stand anywhere near a wall or door, though, and the controls jam up, leaving you floundering around, going nowhere. You can probably guess where enemies tend to appear, too. Yes, right behind every second doorway.

Any tension that could have been built up with these staple horror techniques is thrown even further off-base by the fact that you die as soon as you come in contact with any enemy. You don’t even have the pleasure of watching them gnaw on your neck, but are rather just presented with an MS Paint-style ’You Died’ screen.

Although enemies move at different rates, this one-hit kill approach leaves them with no sense of weight. This isn’t a shooter, it’s a horror-themed game of tag.

Your weapons are equally weightless. You start off with a rifle, grenade launcher and shotgun. You need a few more shots with the rifle to kill enemies, but the enemies react to fire in the same way regardless of which weapon you’re using – that is to say that they seemingly don't react. They just glide on towards you as if helplessly skittering along the floor on rollerskates.

This conspicuous lack of production values makes it all the more irritating when Dark Hill tries to force strategy on you. You have to be so sparing with your ammunition that if you accidentally let off a stray bullet, you might as well restart the level. It’s not as if it’s easy to get away from enemies without blasting them either, not when you’re likely to get stuck on a rogue door frame as you’re about to make your getaway, only to be given the kiss of death by some lurching mound of flesh.

The result is that any horror Dark Hill does manage to conjure is based on the horrific prospect of having to restart the level once again, dragging yourself at a snail’s pace through a series of drab environments, ham-fistedly blasting away at a series of enemies that have been pilfered from fellow survival horror games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil. You’ll probably run out of ammo just before you get to the end anyway.

With all these flaws effectively hammering up the coffin that is Dark Hill, it's the sheer lack of fun that provides the final nail. Amateurish, unattractive, and burdened with unwieldy controls, the only thing scary about Dark Hill is the prospect of paying for it.

Dark Hill

An unabashed knock-off of much better survival-horror games, Dark Hill stumbles around trying to find illuminating gameplay yet never switches it on
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