Darkness, darkness everywhere and you alone in the midst of fear and hunger! Are you the Warrior who will finally survive through the darkness and emerge into eternal light? If you think you have what it takes to combat floor after floor of evil creatures and a pitch black surrounding, then go ahead and download the game Darkness Survival. This game is a rogue type title from the developers Zero Plus Plus Software and provides players with a taste of both endless survival and role playing adventure games. Darkness Survival is available to download and play for free on iOS devices from the Apple iTunes App Store as well as on Android devices from the Google Play Store.
The game comes packaged in a reasonable size of 104 MB. The graphics are not picturesque and are quite arcade looking but what need do you have of a beautiful stage when you cannot see most of the things due to the extreme darkness. The game also contains adaptive music which changes rhythm when creatures appear or when you are feeling hungry and this effect will definitely make you skip a heartbeat during the later levels when suspense is high and darkness profound. The gameplay style of Darkness Survival calls for the player to explore the entire dungeon floor in order to get maximum benefit from the adventure bit this is not an easy task given the dark ambience and plethora of evil creatures at every turn.
Darkness Survival sets itself apart from other Survival games by not having any re-spawn checkpoint. If you die in the game, you die, Period! You will have to explore all over again and this time the dungeon might hold different mysteries and dangers in store for you. This ever changing scenario introduces an element of surprise into the otherwise redundant gameplay of similar rogue style dungeon exploration games and you will find yourself hooked to the screen of your smartphone for hours on end.
It doesn’t matter of you were born to love the darkness much like Bane from Batman or if you are scared to your wits whenever the lights are turned off, Darkness Survival offers a challenge for every kind of player. The starting two floors of the dungeon will be quite easy for you as they are meant to familiarize you with the gameplay mechanics. However when you progress to the third floor, you will immediately notice the sharp spike in difficulty level that comes with it.
Needless to say this level continues to rise exponentially and the dungeon floors will become impossibly long so much so that you may not be able to reach the next floor given a whole hour. This insane rise in difficulty is part of the rogue gameplay style so instead of complaining about this fact you can improve your skill level to beat whatever obstacles the game chooses to throw at you. This guide will help you do just that and who knows if you are a fast learner and a true Warrior, you might be able to emerge victorious from the darkness of the eternal dungeon.
1. Your Life Depends Upon HP
Quite literally the measure of how much life you have in the game and an indicator of how much damage you can take before dying. The Health Points bar is displayed in red color in the top left corner of the game screen. A great addition to Darkness Survival during the recent updates is the increase in your maximum health as you level up by defeating different enemies that you encounter across the dungeon floors. This means that the longer you are able to survive in the darkness and kill more enemies, the stronger you will be to face the more advanced dungeon floors.
It is quite easy to get fooled into believing that you have a lot of health points after you take down an enemy. What most players tend to miss is the passive regeneration of 1 HP per each 10 steps that you walk in a certain direction on a dungeon floor. Thus during the early dungeon floors, it will appear that you took very little damage during your fight with a creature or two. Do not let this passive regeneration mislead you into making hasty decisions during the later levels. As a general rule, you should start to take your HP bar very seriously after BF3 which is the third dungeon floor in the game. This is because, enemies present on dungeon floors after this will usually have the power to finish you in one or two blows if you are careless enough to give them the opportunity to attack you.
A very good way to ensure that you will always be at full health when you face your next enemies is to abuse the passive regeneration function in the game. To take advantage, whenever you win a fight with a creature, see how many points you have lost from the HP bar. If you estimate the loss to be more than 1/4 of your overall bar length, then do not open any more gates or walk down unknown pathways until you have regenerated to your full HP. The easiest way to accomplish this target is by walking back the exact path that you used while coming to your current spot. Granted there are sometimes random enemy re-spawns along the same path but ninety percent of the times you can safely regenerate your entire HP by tracing back the exact path. Be sure to use this trick on the 5th dungeon floor before fighting the boss because it will be hard as it is to fight with a full HP bar so make sure to keep this advantage in the palm of your hands.
2. You Need Energy To Survive
Just like your Health Points bar, your energy bar shows the current energy level that your character has. Located just below the red HP bar in the top left corner of the screen of your smartphone, the yellow colored Energy Level bar has some different properties in the game. You start off with the most basic warrior character which has high attack potential but almost no magic skills. Therefore, the first few times that you play, you will almost be able to ignore the energy level bar unless you start using the limited magical power that you have to defeat common creatures that you encounter on the dungeon floors.
That being said, a powerful melee attack combo also takes a large chunk out of you energy bar and this can definitely pose a dilemma for you as a warrior. Remember to always save the powerful melee attack combos for the most difficult creatures. You can estimate the hit points you need to deal to a creature by throwing a dart at it if it is far away or using a single normal melee attack on it. If your attacks make almost no difference to the hit points of the creature, it is best for you to initiate the powerful melee attack combo in order to ensure your continued survival on the dungeon floor.
However, unlike the HP bar, the energy level bar does not remain static and is also an indicator of the hunger that your character will inevitably experience once you have covered a dungeon floor or two. There are various food ration supplies scattered on every dungeon floor and sometimes finding them can be a real challenge but they are well worth the effort because dying from hunger is one of the most common sources of failure in Darkness Survival.
In addition to eating food rations, you can also replenish the energy level of your character by drinking potions that are golden in color. Once drunk these potions instantly refill the energy level bar so it is highly recommended to save these potions for use before a particularly difficult creature or a boss fight level. Once you have understood the importance of the energy level bar you will definitely take care to keep track of it while exploring the deep dark recesses of the eternal dungeon. Just remember to obtain at least one food ration per dungeon floor at the minimum and you should be well equipped to deal with the horrors that await you should you succeed in surviving.
3. Power and Strength Matter
Life and Energy were the two basic and most obvious factors controlling the survival of your character in Darkness Survival. Now we move on to the more technical details which will help you make decisions as you manage to proceed further into the deep dark recesses of the dungeon.
First and foremost, you need to be aware of the physical strength of your character in the game. This characteristic is denoted by “STR” in the “view” tab of your character’s description. You will start off with a warrior whose STR is 11 and you will find a weapon known as the “Tongfa” in one of the dungeon floors which has a STR value of 13. This means that your character can equip the weapon but it will not prove very useful in combat situations because the weapon is too heavy compared to the strength of your character. Upon choosing to equip such weapons which require a greater strength than you possess, you will also be warned with a note in the game so consider your options well before deciding. Generally it is preferred to have strength over agility in the easier floors of the dungeon because your enemies are very weak and you will be able to finish them off with a single blow leading to faster progression through the dungeon floors. After the BF3 dungeon floor, you should switch back to weapons which allow you to have a greater range of motion and dodging abilities because the boss at BF5 will hit very hard and you need to be able to dodge in order to defeat that monster.
The second characteristic that you do not have any control over initially but can improve as you progress throughout the game, is the “defense” and “armor” of your character. Darkness Survival is a rogue style game where the decisions that you make during the course of the game can alter your progression through the dungeon floors. Needless to say, a higher defense will mean you can take much more damage before your HP bar reaches to an alarming level. You will not be able to have a high defense as you start off however and this characteristic can only be upgraded either by leveling up during your exploration of the dungeon or by using the memory fragments that you obtain after you fail in your adventure. Depending upon your play style, if you prefer to use melee attacks more, putting a few points into defense would prove very beneficial for you. If you would rather annihilate your enemies with magic, it is better if you save those upgrade points for spells and AOE abilities.
4. Life After Death
Darkness Survival is one of the few adventure exploration games on the market which feature permanent death in the game. There is no re-spawn from a specific dungeon floor or a checkpoint with a certain number of lives. However, the developers of Darkness Survival have made the game much more interesting by introducing the concept of an afterlife in the game. After you die, you are shown your current progress and your best progress since you started playing the game. After this display, you are taken to the gates of the dungeon where you seemingly will start all over again. Your previous journey through the dungeon will help you here by providing you with fragments of memories from your last adventure. You can store these memories in the memory box accessible from the main menu of the game. These fragments of memories, once accessible after a certain time limit, will enable you to upgrade various skills, abilities and properties of your main character in the game. For example the first memory fragment will allow you to put points into the upgrade for faster repairs. This upgrade will ensure that your weapon does not deal reduced damage due to being weak from a previous fight with a creature on a dungeon floor.
Similarly, as you complete more and more consecutive adventures into the dungeons of darkness, your collection of memory fragments will continue to increase until you have reached the limit of memories that can be contained in the memory box. When this limit has been reached, you will have to wait for 1 day before your memory fragments are opened or you can choose to spend the in-game currency known as “Ancient Coins” to open them immediately. However, spending Ancient Coins just for the sole purpose of speeding up this process is definitely not recommended due to their rarity. You can only obtain Ancient Coins in the game by completing certain objectives and defeating bosses on the dungeon floors. These coins will serve as your main currency to purchase new weapons and upgrades for your character which will play a much more important role as you move on to new characters in Darkness Survival. Therefore resist the temptation offered to you by the game and let time run its course because a true warrior is marked by the patience that he has in face of adversity.
5. Magic Scrolls, Potions and Elixirs
No dungeon game would be complete without the promise of finding mysterious things along your way. Darkness Survival continues upon this tradition by making available a variety of different recipes, scrolls and potions scattered across dungeon floors. It is also a lure to get you to explore the entire dungeon floor even after you have found the entrance to the next floor but the usefulness of these items is well worth the effort.
Recipes allow you to upgrade certain items like weapons and armor, sometimes even magic. In addition, recipes can be used after your death in the game during the afterlife screen. Similarly, you will find many different potions like the “regeneration” , “energy” and “mystery” potion hidden in pots or chests or simply lying behind a patch of wild grass. The potion description does not indicate what effect it might have on your character and you can garner this information only by drinking the potion.
Magic Scrolls are another item in Darkness Survival that is utterly shrouded in mystery. Whenever you find a scroll be sure to keep it safe and not read it immediately because they operate in a random manner. Some scrolls will cause instant magic to happen and you do not want to waste this ability on weak enemies on a dungeon floor when you could have used the magic to win a difficult boss fight. Therefore, like always, patience is the key here if you hope of surviving the dark dungeon and emerging victorious as a warrior into the eternal light!