Everdark: Undead Apocalypse PS5 Review 7/10 “Staked through the heart and you’re to blame. Darling, you gave me a fun time” 🪦⚰️🧛 @everdark_undead #IndieGame #GameDev

The story starts with a car crash, you are driving when you get lost, and then all of a sudden… you crash your car in the town of Everdark, which - gosh dang it - is overrun by vampires. 

You now need to get the hell out of there before one of the those long-toothed beings takes a bite and drinks away, deciding if your blood is more ‘full bodied with woody overtones and hints of crushed cigars, or more of a lighter bodied sip with floral notes and just a few touches of vanilla.

The story is a simple one, and is not to Everdark’s detriment at all, as all you need to know is - there are a lot of vampires and you need to kill them, then leg it. Simplicity is probably what I got most from playing Everdark, it knows what it wants and does it throughout all aspects, the visuals, gameplay, and story are all simple, they are focused on what they want to achieve with what I would say is quite a good success rate. 

The title has obviously taken its inspirations from games such as Doom and Resident Evil, with B movie, ‘80s horror being another direct inspiration. It seeps into all aspects of your experience whilst playing, the visuals - whilst nothing technically all that impressive - do bring a nice atmosphere, the cold, dark forest or the dimly lit streets are all captured with good ambience and callbacks to the inspirations Everdark has.

The gameplay is everything you would expect it to be, find a gun or a melee weapon and go to town. You pick up guns such as a handgun or a shotgun and melee items such as axes or iron pipes, you then find hordes of vampires and fire or bash away at them, but there is a twist you see - vampires cant actually die from these methods, the creatures of the night have to be staked through the heart, so you weaken them with your weapons and then have to move to stake them straight through the heart, but you need to be quick, wait too long and they rise back up to attack again, this is a great mechanic which keeps the action frantic and you on your toes. 

Later on, you get a crossbow which - if hit in the right area - kills them in one which is cool thematically, but being a one shot weapon, this can only be really used at certain times with only a few enemies, trying to reload does take time and can easily get you swarmed and killed.

One of the things I really enjoyed most was the music, it’s all over the shop and I mean that in the best way possible. Synth, rock, metal - it changes almost every mission, in some areas it is quite quiet, it really made every mission and area feel different from each other. Speaking of music one mission is entitled ‘Radio GA GA’ and being the 2nd biggest Queen fan in the world, it made me smile and realised it might be a double nod as Resident Evil have a lot of Queen references as well, it doesn't make a huge difference, but it made me happy - so good.

It does have some faults though and there is no getting around it -the game has a lot of rough edges. In fairness, Everdark: Undead Apocalypse was made by a team consisting of a handful of people, it was nothing that stopped me playing or enjoying my experience, but the overall game does lack at times, although I will give the developers big props, as of a few days ago they are still updating and adding improvements to frame rate, lighting, and mechanics - so kudos to them. 

I think what will frustrate people the most is difficulty, you will die a lot (especially at the beginning), although the levels are on the smaller, size save points seemed few and far between which meant a lot of doing the same parts over and over. I went in guns blazing at the start which soon made me realise you run out of ammo quickly and if you can sneak around undetected that's probably the better option, bullets are scarce and becoming overrun happens swiftly, so not wasting ammo is a big challenge. 

The one thing that took me a long time to remember is that you don’t auto reload - you have to manually do it, and that got me killed several times. Another negative is related to aiming, usually when you aim you go down the sight or scope of the gun, here, the camera just moves about two inches closer, it is a negative, but I spent my whole time with Everdark tickled as I felt my character was just squinting slightly as he aimed.

SUMMARY
Although it lacks polish at times, I enjoyed my time spent shooting and staking vampires to my heart’s content, it has drawbacks but overall it took me a few hours to complete and I had fun throughout, it may not stay too long in the memory, but while playing I was entertained.

7/10

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