Dark Hunting Ground

My thoughts after a couple hours:
- Fun lazy arvo game.
- Plenty of build freedom.
- The aesthetics are uniform and pleasing.
- Dying isn't essential, runs don't begin from the start again.
- I haven't seen one preset to adjust all 'presets' yet.
- Stats aren't clear. Feel like I have about a 50% understanding on what damage types and stacking is happening.
- No cut scenes or long mono/dialogues.
- Not punished for trying out combo's which fail.

This game has flicker strike (and its viable). I know there are some people out there (such as myself) who are willing to buy the game just based off that info alone

Now that that's out of the way, i do have one more thing to make very clear about this game before I even comment on the gameplay i have to mention just how ABYSMAL the translation is, there are plenty of places that straight up don't have translations (they show up in Chinese) luckily those missing translations are all in places where they are not too hard to figure out the meaning to (ex: a continue/ok button on a popup) but there are a few just really poorly worded descriptions for skill or item effects (likely machine translated) that are so bad it can sometimes make it hard to figure out exactly what they do

That's not the end of the TL problems though. There are 2 different skill augments called "charge" one makes you "charge" at out of range enemies with melee attacks, the other gives you the option to "charge" up an attack for a second or so to do more damage, both of them are called "charge" which creates some confusion.

I'm not asking for/demanding perfect English from a dev who likely cant speak it at all, just good enough to understand what things do is fine, if they could have someone who speaks both languages at least a bit sanity check the translation files that would be great.

One thing i cant overlook is the search function seemingly not being effected by the language settings, it feels like it gives me almost random results, which i believe is because its searching the list in Chinese (presumably the Pinyin text version) this makes the search function 100% useless for anyone who doesn't speak Chinese.

All of the above is honestly pretty standard for an early access game from Chinese indie dev's, while i do hope it gets fixed soon, i have my doubts it ever will. Its not enough of a problem to keep me from playing the game, but i'd be doing an active disservice by not mentioning it at the top of my review, as im sure it is more than enough to ruin the game for many non Chinese speakers.


As for the actual game itself, its pretty good. its got a skill system simmilar to the gem system in PoE, just witth much fewer skills total, but a similar level of complexity to them, with all of your favorite PoE oddities like cast on damage taken, cast on hit, minions/totems/turrets casting your skills instead of you, and so on and so forth.
This game does differ quite heavily from PoE though in that it's streamlined just about every aspect of the formula down to be easier to immediately pick up and understand. PoE is a game so esoteric and overly complex that most people wont even finish once before they resort to following a paint by numbers build guide. this game cuts a lot of that depth out, which is not a bad thing, in fact i'd say its a good thing. instead of asking first time free divers to take a quick jaunt down to the bottom of the mariana's trench of mechanical depth that is PoE this game makes a far more reasonable course and lets you play around in a shallow reef before gradually moving up to deeper waters as you get comfortable. it never reaches the same level of depth as PoE, but it does get pretty deep, and as someone who doesn't have a PhD in PoE build crafting, the marginally simplified mechanics are much appreciated.
The game features a perfectly serviceable crafting and item progression system that is well explained, has lots of quality of life features like built in loot filters, auto loot, auto dismantle, reroll until x affix (or stop at any number of selected affixes) when crafting and whatnot. great stuff that you normally only see in quality of life mods for single player ARPG's (if only that search bar worked in English ;-;)


TL;DR:
If you like build crafting in ARPG's but don't want to get a PHD in PoE, and you can tolerate some at times incredibly questionable translation, this is worth checking out, at the very least give the demo a shot, it lets you do roughly the first 30 min to an hour of progression and the save file transfers into the full game flawlessly if you do decide to buy it.

So I was lured in by the free demo.

Simple game play, surprisingly intricate interaction with skills. This was great.

Bought the game for $10 (gamble based on graphics alone). And after 4 hours? In the current iteration I'm supremely disappointed. Max level is 50. Like they are doing a Borderlands thing where you only have X skill points to distribute across several different disciplines. But there aren't defined classes, so you effectively have to pick 1 of the 5 given to you, in order to be effective at anything.

It offers a lot of skill customization, though most of the items you pick up WILL be garbage.

As a ranger, I literally plopped myself in a corner and held down attack. My potion was always active. And killed everything. It's boring.

I'd love to see a harder progression. Let us amass more skill points. Let us get higher levels.

At $10... This is not worth the price point. I'd recommend this one sale only and after some refinement.