The Dink Network

Day of the Carcass

In this game, you play as a brother and sister team. From the COTPATD project.
February 27th, 2010
v1.00
Score : 7.0 good
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Day of the carcass... The dmod with the real snazzy trailer. Is the demo as awesome as that trailer? No. But it's not disappointing either.

First off, this dmod has rather ridiculous system requirements. I imagine it's because it has several quick loops running at the same time, but I couldn't play this game without it being very choppy, on a laptop that can run TES IV: Oblivion satisfiably. If you were planning to play this on a 15-year old cabin computer while waiting for it to stop raining outside, that probably won't be much fun.

On a good computer, the gameplay is intriguing. The player's sidekick, David, has a sword and several special/magic attacks that, after getting familiar with the keys to make him unleash them, were pretty fun. David can also dodge attacks made by enemies, which is really cool... Right up to the last fight, where he never seemed to get a hit in because he was constantly dodging projectiles. I wish there was a way to toggle his dodging off, along with a fully working co-op mode, one huge fun factor in other games that has always been missing from Dink Smallwood. But something like that would be very difficult to implement in v1.08, so I can't penalize poor Erwin too much for lacking it. =)

The player character herself, Nadine, uses a bow. She also has a few magic bow attacks, and has a chance to do a critical strike, a piercing strike, or both at the same time, which work similar to the power shots in original Dink. Nadine was a low point, in my opinion, since you rarely have enough time to pull the bow all the way back (before the monsters get close enough to strike you or David kills them), so I was constantly relying on critical strikes to be able to do any damage. Critical strike with piercing strike together, or Nadine's special attack (which does both as well as combines all her magics to it), on the other hand, were overpowered, easily doing hundreds of points of damage, whereas her regular attack could barely scratch monsters for 5 points. Later on, when fighting spiders that could freeze and slay David quickly, I found myself leaving the game running on a monsterless screen, go fetch coffee while waiting for Nadine's mana bar to fill up, come back, enter the screen and slaughter all the spiders at once with Nadine's special attack. This is not good gameplay.

The mana bar, which acts somewhat like a second magic bar, is another new addition. The bar replenishes itself, thankfully, but it fills up depressingly slowly, so mana potions and such would be a welcome addition.

I've been ranting solely about the gameplay so far, because that is the big focus in this demo. The game itself is very short, the vast majority of which is spent learning the new keys and gameplay. The story still manages to get quite interesting, and the mapping and scripting is excellent. The music, sounds and dialogue are also good, but not quite as much as those.

It's a promising, very ambitious and already impressive demo, but still needs a lot of improving before it can get really good. If the full version ever comes out in 2020, it will be a hit.