Steffi has been waiting for the sci-fi RPG Dark Envoy since it was announced. Now she has finally tried it out for herself – and is both excited and disillusioned at the same time.
Dark Envoy has thrown me into emotional turmoil. I tried the upcoming role-playing game for myself for the first time via Steam demo and it was like a very fickle date: we hit it off right away, but the more we got to know each other, the more question marks popped up over my head. And as is so often the case, Dark Envoy didn”t look quite as pretty in real life as the profile pictures had previously suggested.
I”ll go through point by point what I liked so far and what gave me a slight stomach ache. So that you can decide whether Dark Envoy is worth a short date to you.
Table of Contents
What”s this all about?
Dark Envoy is a classic role-playing game with iso-perspective, tactical battles, skill trees, tons of equipment and decisions. This sounds like standard genre fare at first, but it has a few special ideas in it that made me sit up and take notice back at the Reveal:
- The setting mixes fantasy and sci-fi: a bitter war rages between the human empire and the magical races (elves, orcs), in which one fights with technology and the other with magic power.
- Tactics becomes very important in the game. For example, I should take cover behind crates from enemy shooters, but they shatter after a few hits. The combat system mixes real time with slow motion, thanks to which I take new positions and fire my skills in peace.
- The campaign can be played completely in two-person co-op each of us controls one of the two main characters.
- I paint many skills onto the battlefield, so to speak, by drawing the attack zone with the mouse. This already feels cool in the demo, here in the video you can see how the whole thing works:
Sounds exciting on paper? I think so too, but how is it playing so far? It”s complicated.
My editor dream come true
I would so love to have sunk an entire hour into the character editor, building the two siblings Malakai and Kaela together. So many colours and shapes, my tinkerer”s heart rejoices. And every option looks cool, from make-up to scars to hairstyles! But I”m not here for fun, there”s still playing to be done. So I move a few sliders and then set the class and skills of my dynamic duo.
At this point it would be helpful if Dark Envoy would tell me more about the merits and weaknesses of the classes. For instance, I don”t know if it makes sense to combine the two ranged fighters. To be on the safe side, I choose melee warrior and pistol shooter. In a demo, such ambiguity is just about forgivable, but it must be different in the finished game!
But that makes me feel better right away: In addition to the classes, I can also choose the equipment set, for example, whether I prefer to start with two axes or a sword and shield. Later I can also specialise my class, so there are a lot of possible combinations.
The first cracks quickly become visible
After I”ve had a good romp in the editor, Dark Envoy starts with a short intro of still images and voice-over that briefly outlines the setting. Humans are the bad guys here, at least those who belong to the Empire. Malakai and Kaela, on the other hand, have grown up in the desert and are not (yet) on any side in the war.
The short video sequences look stale, the faces are stiffly animated and flat. The entire world looks detailed compared to, say, a Divinity: Original Sin 2 but of course there is a much smaller budget here – so don”t expect the final version to look much nicer.
The demo then sends me through a kind of tutorial in which I first control only Malakai and fight the first battles. I can”t judge from the demo how cool the powerful skills will feel later on, but so far the battles are fun.
As soon as I run into the cone of vision of an enemy, the game automatically switches to slow motion so that I can paint my skills in peace. With a press of the space bar, everything then continues at normal speed, I can switch between tactical slow motion and real time at any time. This is how it looks in one of the first battles of the demo:
What”s going on here: No XP for fights?
What I immediately notice after the first slaughter with desert scorpions: Defeated enemies don”t give me any experience points. This is so unusual that at first I think it”s a bug in the demo, but no! A little later, the game explains its XP concept to me: I get experience for reaching milestones, such as a certain point in the story. Nothing with +10 XP per defeated enemy. And the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me.
Most games reward aggressive action with enemy XP and punish it if I avoid a fight – because if I knocked my enemies down, I would have gained experience and thus levelled up. In Dark Envoy, on the other hand, I am free to make such decisions, and so at the first opportunity I also choose the diplomatic path instead of fighting a few desert bandits:
The details make me doubt
So far, it all sounds pretty good – doesn”t it? As I mentioned before, unfortunately not everything went so harmoniously between Dark Envoy and me. While I still celebrate the freedom of choice with the bandits, the voice acting spoils my high spirits again: For a brutal desert gangster, the guy talks in a very high-pitched British way (there”s no German voice output). And he just sounds … not good. I hope these are just placeholder voices, because if many NPCs sound so much like amateur actors, then I”d rather have no dubbing at all.
The two main characters sound better, but their sibling squabbles walk the very thin line between “Charming” and “Annoying”, with a slant towards the latter. A conversation about how Malakai shouldn”t fall on scorpions” butts again lasts way too long, the joke has worn off and I want to skip it – although I”m really patient about that and always let the characters finish.
With smaller role-playing games like Dark Envoy, it”s incredibly important to me that I like the characters – they have to make me feel better about the loss of graphics quality and so on. I”m genuinely worried about making friends with the cheeky siblings right now.
So will there be a second date between Dark Envoy and me? Yes, yes there will, I”m still extremely curious about the role-playing game, which is due to be released sometime in 2023. The story could be really exciting and the co-op mode is my biggest hope for Dark Envoy anyway. If it turns out to be good, I”ll let all the bandits talk like queens! And if it turns out that we don”t fit together despite all the anticipation, luckily there are still plenty of other RPG candidates coming out this year!
How do you like Dark Envoy so far? Does the science-fantasy setting of the role-playing game pick you up? Are you bothered by such shortcomings as wonky dubbing, outdated graphics and dialogue with a certain extraneous shaming factor? On the other hand, the combat and experience system could be really refreshing – feel free to let me know your opinion in the comments.
Editor”s verdict
If I were forced to give Dark Envoy”s demo a school grade, I”d stammer and shake worse than I did back in the Maths unit on the goat problem. Fortunately I don”t have to – because I”m not yet clear whether hope or scepticism prevails.
On the one hand, there are really cool ideas in it, but on the other hand, the implementation seems really bumpy in places. I don”t think too much will change before the release, but at least I hope that the soundtrack will turn out to be acceptable. In the end, Dark Envoy stands and falls for me anyway with something completely different.
One big question remains completely unanswered for me: How well does Dark Envoy play in co-op? I”ve been hoping for years to finally find a classic tactical role-playing game like Divinity: Original Sin 2 that I can sink dozens of hours into with my best friend. If the adventure is really fun for two, then I can easily overlook extraneous dialogue and simple graphics.
