Darkest Hunters

mobile port of a puzzle quest knockoff. a voiced but not subtitled intro starts the game (every single time) with 'hold mouse to skip' on top. good, no tapping, I thought. then the splash screen appeared with 'tap to play', but the mandatory tutorial reverted back to clicking. the game's nothing if not inconsistent. 13 heroes to choose from, just a different avatar and backstory. your character has health, attack and mana, recovered by matching their respective colors. matching and even not matching but selecting a single tile moves the hero on the board as much as you want (there's bread to buy on mobile). fight enemies and bosses and grab chests that open instantly, unlike on mobile. still too much clicking to do, same for rewards, gets tiresome fast. respec is free but reassigning dozens of points by dragging them one by one to the desired location is even worse, though you won't do it all that often. bigger matches create power-ups that remove a bunch of tiles and deal elemental damage. there's a counter and an arrow to indicate how powerful the result will be and which direction(s) it will take care of. nice touch. the town has various places to visit. check enemy info if yo…

Darkest Hunters is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. The game is a badly made, badly translated, very basic Match-3 (Bejewelled ripoff), but with some crap RPG elements tacked onto it. This isn't making Match-3 games better, it's making RPGs worse. From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a pr…

While the idea of a match-3 roguelike dungeon-crawler is inherently appealing to me, I found the gameplay loop got old really quickly. Sometimes, I just want to go to the other side of the map so I can get to the door, I don't want to have to keep drawing lines to get there. Many times, it seemed like the star quest goals would be impossible, stages literally not having enough of a given enemy for you to complete them, and I'm not sure what to do about that. Regular attacks also using a point pool like magical attacks kind of sucks. The translation is rather poor, leading to a lot of confusion about things that should have been rather simple. And maybe the nail in the coffin, at least for me, is that the first boss was pretty easy while the second felt nearly impossible, and not in a fun way. Good game idea, but the execution isn't doing it for me.

Fun. Not mind bending

works well on deck

This game is kinda fun