Dark Area

A common teaching method at school when I was a nipper was the how-not-to-do-it technique.

By pointing out a glaringly obvious example of the wrong way to do things, it served to highlight the correct path and made you feel all smug and superior for realizing which was which into the bargain.

Silly old Mr Pratt goes out cycling at night wearing all black, with nothing but a bobble hat on his head. He always rides on narrow paths where possible and where none are available he rides against the flow of traffic. He never checks over his shoulder or indicates before turning.

Silly old Mr Pratt. We all know better, don’t we children?

Meet Dark Area. It’s a lesson in how not to make a first-person shooter for iPhone.

The game’s a veritable tick list of what not to do in the genre. Long loading times – check. Ugly, indistinct graphics – check. Shoddy controls – check. Clunky AI – check. Unsatisfactory combat – check. Overly simplistic, yet poorly signposted missions – check.

But checklists don’t make for very interesting reading, so I’ll endeavour to elaborate.

The first thing that will strike you about Dark Area – once the thing has finally loaded up – is the total lack of effort that’s gone into setting the scene. There’s a rather cursory introduction screen that tells you your task is to rid your world of alien invaders and that’s it.

No explanation, no tutorial level – you’re just dumped into the world like a confused newborn. Heck, there’s not even a screen outlining the controls in the options menu.

And boy, do the controls need every bit of help they can get. Abandoning the standard dual analogue stick control scheme adopted by every other decent iPhone shooter, Dark Area ties full movement control to your left thumb.

Your right thumb is occupied with a clumsy stack of four equally sized buttons that let you look around (holding the button turns the directional pad to viewpoint control), turn on your torch, change your weapon and fire your weapon.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with an old-skool single-plane control system in a shooter, but Dark Area seems to deliberately engineer fights across varying altitudes that just beg for simultaneous movement and viewpoint controls.

The game's solution to this is a woefully incorporated auto-aim system. It snaps to enemies with disorientating speed, completely ridding the game of any skill. Yet it manages to be frustrating and clunky, as it only seems to kick in when your enemy has spotted and engaged you.

This means that losing a chunk of health becomes almost mandatory when entering a new room or area, even when you can see your enemy from afar.

Thanks to some idiotic AI, your lunk-head opponents won’t see you until you’re within spitting distance, but your auto-aim won’t kick in to let you snipe them and the free-aim control is ludicrously imprecise. The only viable tactic is to charge head-first into the fray, guns-blazing.

Not that your weapons are particularly impressive bits of kit, you understand. You begin with your entire complement of guns from the start, which robs Dark Area of a vital sense of progression.

You have such staples as a shotgun, a pistol and an assault rifle (which looks like a cross between a paintball gun and a radar-proof battleship) and an odd second pistol that seems to occupy the middle ground between the standard pea-shooter and the shotgun. Only the shotgun is any fun to use.

I realise that I’ve been very harsh on Dark Area up to this point, with little if anything to say about it that isn’t damning. Unfortunately, that’s because there is very little positive to say. In fact, there are far more negative points to convey that I just don’t have the space to fit in.

But to hell with word counts. There’s the careless level design that frequently snags you or allows you partially pass through seemingly solid objects and the dull coloured key collecting gameplay that felt outdated ten years ago. And let's not forget the way the action goes all jerky as soon as the bullets start flying, or the depressingly unhelpful map screen or…

Thus concludes the lesson in how not to make an iPhone shooter. For a contrasting lesson in excellence, see N.O.V.A.: Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance.

That’s all children. Now go out and play.