The Dark Meadow

A much meatier game than many on phones, I really enjoyed the voice-acting and story, top notch stuff. The combat was fair and could use a bit of tweaking, though it is understandably hard to make good combat without a physical controller. I suggest playing with headphones. Overall I really enjoyed it, and the devs are regularly upgrading and making changes. DM often is compared to Infinity Blade and I would say its way better than the first Infinity Blade, but seeing as how I haven't yet played the seccond I cant comment on that comparison.

Ok, so this game uses Infinity Blades combat engine... with the addition of a ranged crossbow and more RPG style control of your stat advancement. If you didn't think the combat and advancement in Infinity Blade were fun then you probably won't be into this game. But, if you did like infinity blade but wanted more control of exploration and a deep creepy story then this game id pretty great. Also there is a lot of reading in the game if you are interested in the back story. You find notes and clippings from Newspapers all over. And the voice acting if fun, a little over the top but high quality and a part of the game I look forward to. We may be a hardware generation away from a Unreal 3 game that's not on rails on iOS... but in the mean time Dark Meadow is not bad at all. Oh, also if you are feeling directionless in the game without a map... look for a white light shining at the end of a hall and always go that way.

The gameplay just doesn't work with the environment or the story. It's just ridiculous. If you want a copy of Infinity blade's gameplay with a kind of point and click adventure, then this game is for you... Just wait until it's on discount.

I don't normally write reviews for games but I had to for this one. To stop people wasting their money. Now I'm not denying how much effort went into Dark Meadow. It looks beautiful, the animations are great, the sound is fine. But as a game it's awful. Ok so I wake up in a room somewhere, I step outside into a corridor, I get attacked by a monster. I beat that monster and take one step forward. And get attacked by another monster. Another step, another monster. Over and over again. Which wouldn't be so bad but the combat ****. Wait for the monster to attack. Dodge it. Swipe furiously on the screen. Repeat till monster dead. Then wait while the game halts and counts up your result. Every. Single. Time. The crossbow **** because the icon you touch to grab it is too small so it's easy to miss. Then when you pull the string back it aims the crossbow upwards so you have to make some stupid swirling motions to aim the damn thing. And the icons used to dodge are too fiddly. The icons themselves are big enough but you have to tap exactly the right spot or they don't work. Which in the middle of combat **** because you're tapping the dodge icon and you don't dodge. So you've battled down a corridor. Go through a door. Oh another corridor. Battle through that, through a door. Oh another corridor. There's no map so you don't know where the hell you are in this mass of almost identical corridors. I must have gone around in circles for two hours. Battling the same monsters again and again, purely because I couldn't tell one corridor from another. Sooner or later you'll die. And it puts you right back where you started. And you have to battle through the whole thing again. Even the menus are confusing. And when you pick up something to read, the scrolling is slow and jerky and keeps stopping and starting whenever it feels like it. I have no idea how far I've gotten into the game, for all I know I've barely scratched the surface, but I just don't want to bother fighting through all the same monsters again for the twentieth time. I'm a veteran gamer, I've finished Doom3, Half Life, Portal, Modern Warfare, Bioshock, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 4, Motorstorm, you name it, I've finished it. So I know how to get through games and I can tell a good game from a bad one. This isn't a good game. I gave it 5 because yeah ok, the graphics are nice. Disappointed.

There is much to like about this game, such as the really excellent graphics and storyline, both points that have been pointed out in other reviews. I would also like to emphasise the incredibly tedious grinding that this game makes you do. You kill the same dozen or so monsters, which are variations on half a dozen general themes over and over. It is beyond tedious, and surprisingly hard. However, there is a good reason for this. Although you are trapped alone in an abandoned hospital, you somehow have access to a store, where you can purchase more powerful items, with either incredible amounts of your tediously spent time, or cold hard cash. Who runs the store is totally unclear, and has nothing to do with the narrative. It has everything to do with inducing you to spend cash. By the end, when the game's difficulty really ramps up, and you have invested a lot of your time, you may be willing to fork it over, just so that you don't die and wake up in the accursed room where the game started, so that you don't have to work your way through the same tedious corridors to the boss fight. That is a dirty trick. The graphics are nice, but one you've seen them enough times, it doesn't really matter.