Dark Salvation Demo

Back when fast-paced 3D shooters were the rage, Doom and Quake were the only sensible choices for a gamer. Nowadays, realism makes everything more exciting from a different point of view, but the games do not provide the players with quite the same atmosphere. Naturally, there still are some contenders in the genre, such as the Painkiller franchise, but it’s not entirely the same.

Dark Salvation is a first-person shooter in which you get to hunt for monsters and explore terrifying levels filled with darkness, fire, lava, and many other unpleasant things. Not only that, but you must also fight to get out and deal with a variety of unsavory creatures that stalk you in the darkness, using a hefty arsenal of weapons and magic spells.

As far as the story is concerned, everything revolves around a girl by the name of Talia, who’s being possessed by an evil spirit and she must escape the realm of a demon by the name of Lucafix. She can use axes, shields, and swords to fight her way out of what seems to resemble hell, although there are also a few magic spells you can cast to inflict damage on the enemies.

The gameplay is about as classic as it can get, because beside having to fight and defeat the monsters, you also have to deal with a bit of platforming and a few traps. Hence, there are the usual timed doors that must be reached before they close, and the gaps that require excellent coordination in order to get exactly right. It gets annoying after a while, especially since there’s not a lot of variety involved in it.

Although you can tell that the id Tech 3 still looks pretty well even nowadays, very little effort went into the animations of the creatures you get to meet along the way. They barely have any flexible anatomic parts, which makes it look like a bunch of stuffed animals is attacking you. On the other hand, the music is quite good and there are enough tracks to keep from getting repetitive.

In the end, Dark Salvation had decent intentions and many would have been happy to relive the golden years of the FPS genre. However, the developers did not have enough experience to make the game enjoyable and everything about it is either unpolished, bad, or downright annoying.