Ever since playing Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3, my standard for role-playing games has skyrocketed. You can’t blame me; after putting in more than 100+ hours of playtime into these games, I realized they are going to be remembered and played for decades to come. So, when I took a look at Dark Envoy’s Steam page, I was very intrigued by the DnD vibes this game was giving.
Dark Envoy is an RPG adventure combining real-time tactical and modern gameplay with single-player and online co-op modes. The game is set in the fictional world of Jaan, where the player controls two relic hunters and their journey as they discover ancient ruins and what secrets lie within them. As this is an RPG, you also get to decide the path and ending by making certain choices in the game.
A Simple Yet Effective Character Creator
Dark Envoy begins with a very simple character customization screen, and this is how I found out that I get to play as siblings Kaela and Malakai. Even though you can’t change these characters’ names, you can choose how they look. The character creator isn’t very detailed, so I didn’t spend two hours deciding how my character should look. At the same time, the simplistic character creator works here, especially when you have to make decisions for two characters.
It took me roughly twenty to thirty minutes to create characters, and once I was satisfied with my characters, the next step was to select the class. This was where I got really confused, and it took a lot more time to decide on. The game offers a total of four classes – Warrior, Ranger, Engineer, and Adept, each with its own abilities and skills to unlock as your character levels up. I ended up choosing warrior for Kaela and ranger for Malakai, so there was a balance between close and long-range attacks against enemies.
The game requires you to distribute attribute points depending on your playstyle for certain aspects like power and endurance. Starting, you get nine points and later get more by leveling up. Since I made Kaela a warrior, I decided to increase her power and endurance to a maximum, while for Malakai, I opted for speed and mastery.
The last aspect of character creation is weapon selection. Each class gives you three weapon sets to choose from. For Kaela, I decided to settle on the Brawler Set, which is mainly a heavy weapon with armor, and for Malakai, I chose the Rifle since it had the highest damage.
Dark Envoy’s character creation has an easy-to-follow structure for an RPG and allows players to select whatever they want. The stats do make a difference in combat, so it is important to take your time and choose your desired playstyle because these cannot be changed later.
A Flawed Story
The story revolves around two characters, Kaela and Malakai, who are relic hunters and explore the ruins of an ancient civilization. Here, they discover secrets that can change the world. Dark Envoy’s established world initially felt intriguing and reminded me so much of a fantasy dreamland with untapped potential. Sadly, the story didn’t do much justice to keep me invested with its lackluster plot, dull cut scenes, and forgettable characters.
Kaela and Malakai are siblings who see the world in a different light. Kaela is more calculated, while Malakai is more impulsive. In certain situations, it is up to the player to decide who they want to side with, and these choices affect aspects of the story. The side characters feel flat as we don’t really have any background story or know much about them, so their interaction with the main characters doesn’t have an impact, and as a player, I couldn’t find myself to care and just moved on.
I wouldn’t say the story is downright bad, but it mainly lacks originality. The universe of Dark Envoy is certainly interesting with human and non-human characters, but the overall writing is something we have seen many times before. It is a typical fantasy story where different factions fight each other for domination while there are greater powers in the form of artifacts that could destroy the world for good. At least, I understood this, but even if you asked me the specifics, I couldn’t tell you because I eventually lost the plot during my playthrough.
The mediocre narrative of the game is a major downside, but thankfully, the gameplay does make up for it… kind of.
Engaging But Repetitive Enemy Encounters
The combat-focused gameplay in Dark Envoy takes place in real-time, where you can pause or go into slo-mo mode, which gives you more reaction time to know the incoming attacks from enemies. At first, I thought I wouldn’t be using this feature, but I thought wrong because it was so helpful to me against big boss fights.
I would say that the combat system is Dark Envoy’s biggest strength. Even though sometimes it got tiring to fight the same enemies multiple times in one area, I still had fun with it. I can say that the gameplay helped me to get used to the game’s overall world. Still, I wish they did tone it down with the enemies at certain times because I would be exploring a small area, and on all four sides of the map, I would come across the same enemy type multiple times, and this does get a bit repetitive and also interrupt the flow of exploration.
The game relies too much on combat and doesn’t let the players focus on exploration or even encourage them to do so. Every other corner has a treasure chest that can be looted, and it did feel a bit uncreative to not have the players earn bigger rewards by solving a puzzle or two. The game has a crafting mechanism, but I only used it once and bought better armor from the merchant since I easily made money within the game.
I have seen multiple players complain about a lot of performance issues and bugs in Dark Envoy, but thankfully, I didn’t face anything major except that sometimes my characters froze and didn’t move for a while. Apart from that, I was randomly separated from my party members during traversal and exploration. This happened at least thrice when I didn’t realize the other sibling wasn’t following the character I was controlling until I got engaged in combat and had to fight the enemies alone without any support. I don’t know if this is a bug, but it was very frustrating.
In Conclusion…
Dark Envoy has its problems, but it also has its moments. Even if the story didn’t grip me, its combat gameplay is equally challenging and fun. I wouldn’t say the game is terrible overall, but could it have been better in certain aspects? Definitely. You can surely feel the passion and drive of Event Horizon as they created such a vast universe within the game. One that will hopefully not go unnoticed.
Dark Envoy
Dark Envoy has its problems but it also has its moments. Even if the story didn’t grip me, its combat gameplay is equally challenging and fun. I wouldn’t say the game is overall terrible but could it have been better in certain aspects? Definitely.
The Good
- Real-time tactical combat
- Good character creator
- Interesting worldbuilding
The Bad
- Story lacks originality
- More combat focused so gameplay can feel repetitive eventually
- NPCs aren't interesting enough
- Dull cutscenes
