If you feel so inclined Dark Matter can be played at that link.




"Is the Game fun?" I often asked myself that very question as I manipulated the game's jittery control system and slowly navigated its linear level design and came to a most disturbing conclusion. It wasn't fun, nor was it not fun -- it was an insidious sort of "unfun" that prevented you from having any real enjoyment. Dark Matter is to fun like burning salt crystals are to beautiful ice sculptures, however first I'll provide a brief of what it is actually about.

You assume the role of a nameless hero (an emo-boy cross between Blade and Laura Croft) who has a first scene that goes

"What to do...what to do.."
"I guess I could go look for Zxantis"
"Now where should I start looking"
*explosion*
"That crater looks like a good place to start"

Now from this we can see that the game is trying to present a cool, dark action-oriented character with an awe inspiring demonic villain ("Zxantis"). However I wouldn't precisely call "I'm bored and the plot calls" the best rallying storyline. (The game's description provides a bit more detail, which boils down to, demons are bad, you kill them, you have a sword, and a gun).

With that in mind the intense (or at least, intensely repetitive) music starts, and you are unleashed on a side scrolling brutal adventure against hordes of demons.















That is until of course, as shown on the right, you realize that the enemies have a crushing inability to strike people inside of them, while you do. And until, as on left, you realize that you are incapable of moving from area to area due to invisible walls forcing you to kill all the enemies, even while jumping across the rooftops. This results in a fun situation where you have used the shoddy jump button to climb all the way up, are making progress, then hit one of them, drop to the floor and are forced to not only walk all the way back to the start to find the one demon you missed, but then to repeat the annoying jumpy process.

To directly assess the goals I would say that it tried to make a cool looking action game with a sword/gun wielding protagonist (like all of the other, other, other ones). Now, it did look kinda cool (if you didn't pay too close attention to the jerky camera and that fact that the moon follows you across the screen like a puppy). However it just degrades into mashing the 'A' button until something dies or you do . Dark Matter attempted a darkly urban theme with a focus on the unknown evil, but it failed, entirely, and would have been much better off without a plot at all. Even once you pass a few levels and get the "Dark Matter" per the game's name (essentially collection tiny red orbs to get a short stint of power) it doesn't become any more unique or interesting.

I wonder why...(and where did the moon go?)

So I finally gave in and asked "why does this exist?" and found

that it was made by one person, so I give him credit for basic use of flash and a few cool blood effects, but other than that it wasn't fun, the instruction are wrong (even his description points out that the tutorial page tells you that D is shoot when it is in fact jump), and some of the buttons don't work. Despite all that it manages to be just playable enough in order to demonstrate just how bad it is.