by Stephen Deck
Dark Savior was sent to me as a gift from a wonderful friend of mine who produces questionable animal-based food products. Dark Savior is an action RPG with platforming sections and a terribly confused combat system. The whole game screams “I don’t know what I am!” and it’s a shame because the potential for a decent RPG is here. It’s just potential that was completely missed.
Review written by Stephen Deck; originally published 06/17/2019 on Teacher by Day, Gamer by Night
Dark Savior isn’t really sure what genre it wants to be. It’s ostensibly an action RPG, but you don’t accrue experience as one does in a traditional action RPG. Instead you get “points” from winning fights, and those points can be spent on level ups, but they can also be spent on health restoration or on hints. The fights themselves are really just extremely crude 2D fighting game style matches. You just wail on each other until one side’s HP is depleted, and it’s best two out of three. It is, as I said, though, extremely crude and rudimentary. There’s not a whole lot of option in terms of “strategy” you can use. There’s some absolutely, but by and large, the fights consist of staying out of range until you’re attacking and then getting back out of range. There aren’t major blocks, there aren’t any real counters or anything. It’s just a big let down. Couple all that with the fact that the dungeons are mostly EXCEPTIONALLY shitty platforming, and the whole game is just…meh. The isometric style view makes it nearly impossible to figure out where you’re going or where you’re going to land from a jump, and while you can rotate the camera somewhat, the control to do so is extremely clunky and awkward. No matter how you slice it, the platforming here is terrible.
There is one gameplay mechanic that I have to applaud, and that’s the game’s branching paths and multiple endings. There are, if memory serves, four different paths that the game can take with respective endings. Visually, the game is okay. All of the characters are 2D sprites, something the Saturn handles extremely well, but the environments, for the most part, feel rather uninspired. The dungeons are fairly linear with only a couple of exceptions. The music is…average. There aren’t really any stand-out songs from the soundtrack, and the voice acting is downright atrocious although that’s fairly par for the course for the mid 90s.
Dark Savior is not an unplayable game, but it’s definitely not a good game. As an action RPG, it’s somewhat subpar. As a platformer, it’s straight awful. The storyline, revolving around a bounty hunter who’s trying to recapture some eldritch evil, has some potential, but the terrible storytelling, the awful voice acting, and the boring gameplay kill that potential right out of the gate. This is one game that I really can’t recommend to anyone. I really had to force myself to get through the second half of the game, and it’s rarely a good game that the player has to force himself to finish. Dark Savior is definitely not a good game.
