Darsana review

[page=Oblivion waits at the gates]

The duel is a wonderful thing: The dance of a swordsman and his opponent, the parries, the blows, a lunge as one combatant notices a weakness in their opponent. Dueling is an art form in which both participants respect the other. In real battle though, killing and living is all that matters - respect doesn't come into it.

Darsana. It's bound to mean something in Latin. To do with war, at a guess. War is what Darsana delivers, team based, fast paced war. Knight and Undead armies clash, and in a struggle of metal and magic, the best team will win the war.

Pxl_Buzzard Says:
"Darsana is one of the coolest ideas for a free standalone out in the world right now. Pretty much, your either playing deathmatch or a mode like BF2142's Titan Mode, where you destroy the other team's gods. Simple, but highly addicting. Being able to purchase weapons depending on how much you did in your last life makes you want to kill people and be a team player like most other games can't pull off. My only complaint with the game right now is that it is in beta form, which means that sometimes playing with even 5 or 10 other people can be quite laggy, and on a few levels, you can fall off way too easily. Other than that, Darsana should be one of the most enjoyable free games of the year."

Who would have though that cinder blocks were the staple of medieval construction materials?

Most medieval games these days seem to be about huge non-linear worlds and epic quest arcs. Few games have taken it upon themselves to let players take a sword to the head of other players, without putting lots of character development and quest dialogue behind it. While depth of character and all the rest of it is awesome, variety is the spice of life, and Darsana is a nice little medieval FPS that focuses on the action, rather than storylines and fleshed out NPC's.

Darsana is different to most other action games, but that doesn't mean that it's going to be better.

[page=Medieval Counter-Strike?]

Nice lighting right there.

"If you're looking for multiplayer Oblivion, then you've come to the wrong place." Chris Page, one of Darsana's lead developers says. Darsana doesn't provide a vibrant world, lots quests and a strong role-playing system, it provides the basis of a very solid action game that isn't too far off being medieval themed Counter-Strike.

There are two very different game modes in Darsana, which help keep the game from getting stale quickly. Both involve a team of knights and a team of undead killing each other as many times as possible using a blend of realistic medieval weapons, and some rather cool magical staffs that wouldn't look out of place in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. The major game mode is "Kill the God", where players have to infiltrate the other team's base and try to kill a statue of their god to win the game. In addition to this, there is a standard team death match mode, which isn't too different from most team based action games.

There are a bunch of weapons available to use in Darsana, and I had a hard time thinking of any more that should've been included. There are swords, axes and clubs for melee combat, and a whole range of bows, crossbows and some rather powerful magical staffs for battling it out from far away. These weapons can be bought when the player spawns using gold coins, which are obtained from killing the enemy and the opposition's god.

Do you smell burning flesh?

Killing people gives more than just coins though. Darsana isn't content with being a straight action game. It has a very interesting role-playing system in place. The more you use one weapon, the better you get with that weapon. It?s fairly logical, really, but I can't think of any other game where it's been implemented, and in Darsana it's very smooth and feels natural.

Darsana has a fair few maps, but not all of them have versions for both the game types. Some of the levels are really quite well laid out, with cover in all the right places to keep the game flowing well. A blend of outdoor standard fantasy and medieval city themes mean that Darsana doesn't go for either standard fantasy or more a more realistic medieval style.

While it's easy to see that Darsana does a lot of things right, playing for any extended period will make what it does wrong painfully obvious.

[page=To be, or not to be]

Melee versus ranged, you're going to want to run.

Darsana is built on DarkPlaces, a modified Quake engine. This means it can have nice shadows, high resolution textures and very detailed models. Darsana does all this very well, and looks better than most DarkPlaces games as a result of it. However, the levels all still look somewhat similar to Quake levels, with fairly low resolution textures and a severe lacking of details when compared to the player and weapon models. While might seem like a fairly small issue, it makes Darsana look very unpolished in places.

Like most games, the first release of Darsana had more than its fair share of bugs. Many of the major ones were nuked in a hot fix released shortly after the game itself and since then a lot of work has gone into the latest version, which should address most of the gripes the community had with the first release. According to Chris Page, the next release will fix a lot of bugs and give Darsana "a graphical update in the model department. The animations will be much smoother and such things as charged attacks with melee weapons and learned skills with each of the magic staffs increase the end users' interest in using that weapon. Such things as walls of fire and chain lightning, along with thrusting attacks and more leniencies with blocking without a buckler will hopefully not only add more depth but increase the amount of usage and strategies of each weapon."

As the sun dawns on this third day...

While the future versions sound very promising indeed, no amount of patching or new versions can fix inherent flaws in the game mechanics though. Most medieval combat games involving some kind of swordplay seem to cop a lot of flak over their combat systems and I'm pretty sure that's simply because swinging a sword at someone 'til they die isn't the most exciting or stimulating thing in the world. Darsana suffers somewhat from feeling repetitive at times, especially when the game is only really fun when using the ranged weapons, and the ranged weapons generally cost a fair bit of money, which can lead to endless loops of losing, which is never fun.

I'm willing to bet that if the developers of Counter-Strike had reduced the functionality and variety of guns and instead added many different types of knife, it wouldn't be as successful and popular as it is today. Darsana tries to overcome this by adding a block feature to the melee weapons, but seeing as it feels kind of sluggish and unresponsive, it's a token gesture at best.

However, that isn't to say the Darsana is a bad game. It has a lot of issues, and it obviously isn't for everyone. The bottom line is though, it can be a lot of fun and it's presented quite well. Taking this into consideration, it's free, so I have no trouble recommending this to anyone who likes action games and medieval fantasy.

(+) Lots of game modes.
(+) Plenty of weapons.
(+) Good RPG system.
(+) Great graphics for a free game.

(-) The maps lack detail.
(-) The limited combat options can get repetitive.
(-) Easy to get into a constant loop of losing.
(-) Even with the hot fix, noticeable bugs remain.