⚔️🛡️ Guild of Darksteel | Nintendo Switch | Review | 5.5/10 | "Immortality Ain’t What it’s Cracked Up To Be" ⚔️🛡️ @DigeratiDM #GameDev #IndieGames

Guild of Darksteel has a promising and high concept setup. As a mercenary ‘cursed’ by immortality, you wearily make your way to the titular Guild of Darksteel in order to join a shady clan of immortals who use their eternal life to solve problems for others in exchange for coin, usually by stabbing things with their swords.

The game begins with your arrival at Darksteel - a huge, looming citadel atop underground catacombs - and your initiation into the guild. Unfortunately, this initial prologue quickly loses its way due to several key issues.

A 2D title billed as a cinematic platform game, Guild of Darksteel has moody music and a great visual identity but loses steam quickly in the way in which it approaches combat and the fundamentals of gameplay.

Firstly, whilst the genre and first impressions do call to mind previous titles such as Flashback, where traversal of the stages progresses through specific actions. The various areas in Guild of Darksteel quickly become repetitive and there’s no challenge in the environment unless you accidentally leap to your ‘death’ at which point you’ll be reincarnated at the nearest re-birth crystal and have to make your way back through the area.

The hook here is that combat (which is always one-on-one) plays out as a sort of rhythm game. You learn your opponent’s attacks/blocks and return with combos of your own - which are upgradable through collecting crystals - to win the skirmish.

The problem is that there are only a handful of enemies in the game and each enemy type uses the same pattern and so you’ll move through the stages doing the same attack patterns over and over again. Each time you walk to an enemy, the game resets you both in position and you either attack or block with no movement needed. There are combos available, but the variety isn’t there to make the combat interesting or rewarding enough and the game quickly turns into a bit of a slog through unremarkable locations, punctuated by samey, set-piece fights. 

As combat makes up so much of your time in the game; the lack of challenge, combined with the extremely basic platforming adds up to a title that feels like it never quite shifts out of ‘tutorial mode’ gear.

Some nice tunes, a promising setup and a solid pixel aesthetic aren’t enough to save Guild of Darksteel from its own gameplay and level design, which deal dual deathblows to the created atmosphere and setup.