There have been some justifiable complaints lately among our commenters about the value, or the lack of it, in Apple’s ongoing Free App of the Week promotion. Indeed, Apple’s last few picks have been – and I’m putting it mildly – less then stellar.
Just a few examples: Wonderkind’s Tiny Firefighters, Sega’s Go Dance and Square Enix’s Mini Ninjas. Right.
That being said, you most definitely won’t want to miss this one. Created by Mildmania and built on the Unity engine, Darklings was released last November to some rather glowing reviews (currently, a 4-star rating in the App Store) and has since gone to win several awards for its mechanics and interesting concept.
The universal app normally costs 99 cents and is now available free of charge until next Thursday, courtesy of the App Store’s Free App of the Week promo.
Darklings is a gesture-driven endless atmospheric adventure game incorporating visually enticing Noire-style graphics (think Limbo or Badland) that puts you in the world of Lum as he tries to save the light. You’ll be traveling through forests and caves battling darklings as you try to bring light back to the world.
What do I mean, Darklings is a heavily gesture-driven game? Well, you’re mostly drawing various symbols in order to posses and purge your enemies. Read on…
Darklings is packed with more than 40 enemies that keep on coming in progressively challenging waves. Should an enemy touch you, it’s game over.
The official description, crafted around the save-the-world theme:
Darklings is an endless survival game you fight through magical worlds where there is a battle between light and dark. Darklings stole all the stars from the world which is an essence of light and brought Darkness.
Our avatar which is a face of light, “Lum”, tries to save the world by purging the darklings and retrieve the stars. Play as the face of light, Lum, only piece of hope left on the universe, and purge all the Darklings to their pits, and begin to save the world!
And your launch trailer:
Here, a few highlights:
- Unique gesture-driven gameplay
- Addictive, fun and natural gameplay like you’ve never seen before
- Draw the shapes on creatures to possess and kill them
- No D-Pads, additional controls, just you and your fingers on the stage
- Addictive, endless survival with various environments
- Battle in the Dark Forest, Caverns and Floating Islands, more coming
- Never ending survival with a huge content, lots of different game sets
- Sweet artwork
- Featured on top notch visual design websites
- Noire artistic style, a delicate taste to your eyes
- Lovely customizations
- Customize your main character, Lum, over 10 customizations
- Be a Monk or a Crow, Wizard or a Wrestler
- Choose what you like and purge the darkness
- Over 40 creatures, 3 families and counting
- Crawlers of the Dark Forest
- Hollows of the Caverns
- Furies of the Floating Islands
- 3 different families with whole different styles
- Impressive boss fights
- Epic boss fights with different tactical strategy for each boss
- Breathtaking soundtracks
- You never heard something like this unless you go to the Batman movie
- Challenging objectives
- Lots of objectives to reach higher scores
- Challenging achievements for unyielding players
- Supports iCloud
- Your progress will be automatically saved, you can restore from iCloud in any device any time
- Beat your friends
- high-score based, endless adventures and Game Center achievements
So far so good.
What’s the catch then?
Well, possessing the enemies causes stars to shoot from your character and you need to collect those stars to maximize bonuses and keep on playing (“insert coin”, anyone?), with the larger stars extending the time you get to play each game.
Needles to say, additional stars can be bought in-app. On the other hand, this isn’t a biggie that would hinder your enjoyment of Darklings. Speaking of in-app purchases, Mildmania is offering 50,000 stars with a nice fifty percent discount, just for this week.
Developers have also promised that the game will soon receive an all-new strategic map, capture-the-flag progressive play mode, brand new customization and leveling system and of course a bunch of new enemies, bosses and fights.
Go ahead, download Darklings free from the App Store now.
To learn more about the game, visit the official Darklings website and read our review.