| DarkSwitch | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Overview
What is Darkswitch?
DarkSwitch is a vertical survival city builder that blends city management, exploration, and tower defense, as players construct and defend a settlement high within the branches of a colossal tree. It is set in a dark fantasy world steeped in folk horror where the game has players protecting their growing city from a creeping fog that drives citizens into madness and conceals dangerous creatures.
Darkswitch features:
⚫︎ Basebuilding gameplay centered around a massive tree
⚫︎ Setting reminiscent of Stephen King’s The Mist
⚫︎ Vertical basebuilding
⚫︎ Tower defense-like sections and objectives
⚫︎ Narrative-driven progression
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Darkswitch’s gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Steam |
 GoG |
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| $34.99 | |||||
Darkswitch Review: Digs Deeper as It Goes Higher
Messy Through and Through
Ah, base builders. They're probably the most relaxing and simultaneously the most stressful games ever made. It's always an experience watching the base you've built from the ground up with much satisfaction after hours of a leisurely turn-based session suddenly go into a death spiral because you made one bad decision dozens of turns ago. It's always very frustrating, but somehow very entertaining whenever that happens.
Darkswitch is similar for the most part. It's a base builder where making a mistake somewhere can and will often lead to your empire crumbling to the ground—or just getting several really unfortunate events in a row. However, unlike more endearing titles of the same genre, Darkswitch relies on a predetermined script instead of the organic developments that are the norm. And that's a pretty bad aspect to have, especially when it exists in a genre known for its replayability and longevity.
Beyond that, it's also pulled down by so many minor issues that they can't be considered as nitpicking, such as a whole swarm of bugs and glitches, annoying camera controls, and a terrible color palette. You can think of it as the game as a plate; a single chip on its edge is barely anything to complain about—but if the entire edge is full of them, then it's basically no different from a sawblade.
Politics and the Supernatural Didn’t Mix Well
If you’ve had the pleasure of reading Stephen King’s The Mist, you’d probably recognize Darkswitch’s core narrative themes. It tells the story of a colony trying to survive in a world where they are constantly threatened by monsters and madness hidden by an arcane mist. The colony is established to research the mist and develop a weapon that might permanently create safe zones from it. But, not only do they have to fight against nature itself, but also maneuver around the politics regarding their research and development.
It’s a rather standard story that doesn’t really do anything unique as the plot develops. Sure, there’s a lot of political intrigue that’s fueled by the ever-present threat of the Lovecraftian in the background, but that’s basically where the praise ends. The story is overall simple and rather predictable at the end of the day.
There’s nothing wrong with being simple or predictable, of course. Sometimes, simplicity is actually better so that, for example, you can focus more on the gameplay. The same can’t be said for Darkswitch, however. That’s because not only is its objectives primarily driven by its many “intrigues,” but the same can also be said for how the game tries to direct your base building efforts towards. So the driving force behind your actions not being very convincing really hurts the immersion.
Can’t Explore This Sandbox
At its core, Darkswitch is like your average basebuilder game where you collect resources, create facilities, expand your domain, research upgrades, and manage a population. The same can be said for its objectives, which is essentially just to survive and fulfill very specific goals.
What makes it quite unique, on the other hand, is the basebuilding gimmick and environmental antagonist. That is, in Darkswitch, you don’t have a Generator or central facility that serves as the core of your settlement. Instead, you have a giant tree where you can build all the important stuff on and provide much-needed elevation for your facilities. And instead of fighting the ever-present cold, you have to fight the mist that threatens to kill your inhabitants or make them go mad.
The latter is a particularly interesting feature. You see, the mist is heavier than air, so when it appears, it can only start from the lowest parts of the terrain. That, alongside your limited capabilities to predict mist levels, allows you to plan your city based on height instead of just proximity to light sources, which can repel the mist to some extent. Put simply, the more important a building is, the higher up the tree they should be placed, and any buildings put at lower elevations should be counted as calculated sacrifice in any worst case scenarios.
Unfortunately, the game’s structural rigidity kills the potential of these mechanics. That is, there is no sandbox or custom mode; selecting “New Game” immediately funnels you into a pre-made scenario.. Without the ability to experiment with different terrain, difficulties, or custom scenarios, the game’s longevity is non-existent. And that’s a massive deal, not just because a basebuilder not having a sandbox mode is bad in itself—it’s because when combined with the scenario’s heavily story-driven progression, Darkswitch stops feeling like a creative base-builder and starts feeling like a narrative adventure with building mechanics slapped onto it.
Unpleasantly Spastic Camera
Darkswitch has numerous problems, and every single one of them can be a gamebreaker for many. These range from its abundant bugs and glitches, the oftentimes useless interfaces and accompanying, equally worthless resource management menus, and the atrocious camera controls, I’m particularly displeased with the very last one. After all, bugs and glitches can be fixed, and you can pretend that those interfaces and menus don’t exist to some extent. But the camera? That’s baked into the game. And it’s bad.
First of all, because Darkswitch is a vertical base building game with a massive tree acting as your central area, you will always have a significant amount of your view blocked by your own city. And since the tree is a solid entity, you can’t select any structures located behind the tree unless you rotate your view. On top of that, even just viewing your treehouses is a massive pain because its branches aren’t transparent, requiring you to zoom all the way in just for the camera to get past the foliage and see what’s behind.
Notifications, meanwhile, force the camera to strictly follow the inhabitant it’s attached to. Meaning, if you were to put the game at 3x speed to rush your research and buildings, it’s highly likely that checking your notifications will make you follow an individual zooming around your base like a Hot Wheels on the track, their every movement followed closely by your screen. What’s even worse is that this is done nearly instantaneously, often putting your camera at a place on the map with little to no landmarks.
The entire way it’s designed is extremely disorientating. Controlling your camera and checking your notifications is often an exercise of wrestling with the game’s own controls and quirks rather than making it work with you. This bleeds into the gameplay itself, as losing sight of your facilities and getting confused by the ever-rotating terrain will mess with your ability to keep track of your priorities.
It could have just as easily been addressed, too. For example, a transparency toggle for the tree would be extremely helpful for the former problem. A menu that allows you to access all of the structures built on a tree and organize all the workers there would also be great. But as of right now, the norm is getting lost in the tree city you yourself designed.
The Bugs Outnumber the Monsters
The second worst part about the game is the bugs and glitches. And there’s a lot of them—so many, in fact, that I don’t even know where to begin. I’ve encountered workers tanking enemy attacks and not walking to the medical center that was literally just a stone's throw away, quest targets just randomly wandering into my defenses and dying without clearing the accompanying side objective, the mist appearing where it really shouldn't be, and so on.
Honestly, it’s probably harder to find anything in the game without something broken in it.
On the other hand, I do like the fact that the game is such a mess that it veers into the realm of being comedic. The first example is probably my favorite, because unless you’re aware that it’s a bug, it just seems like your workers love toiling so much that they just decided to ignore the massive grim reaper taking potshots at their heads for hours on end.
Understandable, given how broken this game is. The bugs aren't exactly clutch your sides
hilarious. But, if you treat them as part of the experience, it actually becomes endearing in its own, weird way. Like, there's some strange kind of humor present in the sight of the lowest caste of your people just calmly chopping wood while the local fauna are taking turns biting their ankles.
But don’t misunderstand: Darkswitch’s technical failures are often genuinely game-breaking. Having several dozen of your manpower starve to death even though there’s food in the pantry is a malicious event objectively, even if it’s funny in a vacuum. And considering how this game operates in a way where your decisions have far-reaching consequences, a single event like this can easily ruin a handful of hours’ worth of gameplay.
Is Darkswitch Worth It?
Not Now
At this point in time, it’s extremely difficult to recommend Darkswitch to anyone other than the most desperate of basebuilder enjoyers. There’s too many issues with the game beyond just the already gamebreaking bugs and whatnot. If you take into account the game’s lack of a sandbox mode right at the start and the non-bug-related gameplay problems, it’s too much to even consider when it’s being sold at half the price of a AAA title.
Perhaps in the future when these issues are addressed would Darkswitch be worth your money. And fortunately, by the time of this review's posting, it seems the developers have been actively fixing their game.
Game8 Reviews
