Project DarkFire
A Demo Review by Iblis
Download here

Project DarkFire was recently uploaded to Castle Paradox, and it's quite clearly the creator's first game. This is also a good example of what goes wrong with most first games: a lack of effort and thought. There are so many things wrong with this game that would take mere moments to fix, but were not fixed, likely due to the creator not playtesting the game.

The story of this game is that an evil samurai has destroyed your village, and you go on a quest for revenge. At least, this is what starts you on your quest. This is actually one point it has over the average first game: the main character is actually going on a quest, not just waking up one day and deciding to "explore" for no reason. However, this story quickly vanishes, and you mainly just do what people tell you so you can get to the next area. The evil samurai does appear again after a while, but he quickly disappears because you're not ready to fight him.

This story suffers from several problems, the greatest of which is that it is basically random. There's technically a central plot, that you're trying to get revenge on the evil samurai, but it has nothing to do with any of the other events in the story. The player is just a dupe who solves people's problems just because they say to. No one in this story makes any sense. People you don't know ask you to kill monsters and depose evil kings after a moment of looking at you. This is a fairly simple problem to fix: every time a character does something (whether it's a PC or NPC), ask yourself, "why would this particular character do this?" If you can't come up with a good answer, then the action probably doesn't make sense. Characters who don't make sense will just end up confusing and boring the player (unless it's properly used to comedic purpose, which it isn't here).

The dialogue is also uninteresting, and full of spelling and grammar errors. Many of the NPCs only say "Hi." There were also a number of times that I had a hard time reading the text because of the color. It's important to remember that the color of the text should contrast with 1) the black outline, and 2) the textbox color. Dark gray text with a black outline doesn't work, and green text on a green textbox doesn't work. Also, it's important to never, ever use a transparent textbox. It always makes the text harder to read and it doesn't provide any benefit.

The gameplay too is quite typical of a person's first game. You start out with no skills and can only attack for most of the game. You don't get a new skill until level 10, and even then, it's the same as the default attack for your second character. On the plus side, that attack is actually stronger than your regular attack, so you'll want to use it. But, it costs 0 MP, so now there's no reason to ever use the default attack. Your second character learns a skill at level 20, but it doesn't have any spell lists named, so you can't actually use the attack.

None of the battles are at all difficult except for a particular boss, King Greglord. I had to spend a while levelling in his castle in order to fight him. The rest are either short and easy or long and easy, and none of them require any decisions on the part of the player. Luckily your heroes have very high speed, but it doesn't really make the battles any more enjoyable. You just don't do anything.

Adding to this problem is the high frequency of random battles. It's not uncommon to fight a battle, take one or two steps, and then fight another battle. Battles can also occur where you'd never expect them: on the world map when you're flying your airship (which is given to you for no reason) you can get into fights over the ocean. Why?

Another gameplay issue is the cost of items. In the first shop you can get, among other things, bracers, boots, and a helm. The former two cost 500 whereas the helm costs 100, but each of them raises your defense by one. Why should I pay 400 extra for the bracers or boots when I could get the exact same effect from the helm? Especially frustrating was that these items sell for almost nothing, 5 each. It doesn't make any sense. Potions were far too expensive as well, costing 500 a piece. I didn't really need them much, but it's weird for healing items to be so pricey.

Experience earned also varies wildly, in Greglord's castle you get 60-70 EXP a battle and in the next map you get 750-800 a battle. Sometimes stronger enemies give less experience. Money is a problem in the beginning but gets much easier later, largely because every shop has about the same set of items. So the cost of items stays the same while the amount of money you get increases. You won't need to use much money anyway.

The map design has a number of problems as well. Most of the maps in the game are only one screen, no scrolling in any direction, and contain very little except a path and sometimes walls. The towns are drawn in the one tile per house style, and only very rarely can you enter any of these. Furthermore, the various maps are strung together without any sense of what should go where. After you defeat Greglord you walk past where he was standing and end up in a new map. For some reason there's a path directly behind the throne into a forest. Why on earth would someone build such a path? They wouldn't, but it was an easier way for the creator to keep the player going than actually designing the map in a sensible way. There are also a few door errors, one of which ends the game because you can't go somewhere you need to, a simple problem to fix. The creator used door 0 and forgot to link it to its intended target, sending you all the way back to map 0.

As you can already tell by now, the graphics are not good. The walkabout sprites are drawn in a very strange way, many of them just as outlines with transparent middles. People aren't transparent, it would've been so easy for the creator to just fill in some color, almost any color, and it would've improved these sprites a lot. The main character's sprite doesn't have this problem, but is quite confusing and I can't really tell what he's supposed to look like.

Maptiles lack detail and fit together poorly, often paths and walls which should connect to eachother are a pixel off, as in the above screenshot. Again, very easy to fix, and it should have been easy for the creator to notice it.

Battle graphics are just as bad. All of them except sandsea were clearly just done without effort in MS Paint, and with no regard to the positions of the heroes and enemies. In the commonly used forest backdrop, trees are placed in the middle, one of them is exactly where the heroes are standing and enemies are commonly on the others. The heroes should not be standing on the trunk of a tree, it makes no sense.

The music was all stuff that comes with the engine, and predictably is not placed all that well. "Old Castle" certainly works fine for the castle, but it's not a good battle theme, and most of the other songs don't fit well either.

In the end, there isn't any reason a player should want to play Project DarkFire. Very little effort was put into it and it shows. But so many of the problems in it are so easily fixed, most of them would only require changing a few numbers in Custom.exe. It wouldn't be a great game by any means, more complicated work would be required for that, but it would still be a decent first OHR game.