It’s amazing what you can do with a crossbow. You can shoot creatures – bats and zombies are a speciality, it turns out – but you can also shoot skeletons, which makes us question how that works, anatomically. But that’s just the start. If you can’t reach something high up, just thunk a crossbow bolt into the wall to give you a leg up. Even better, if you have any hanging corpses lying about, shoot them and you can use them as a platform. Finally, crossbow bolts have a cunning ability to push blocks and cages, if you can’t be bothered to move them with your hands. Crossbows: who knew?
They may have called it Dark Burial: Enhanced Edition to give a high-falutin title, but we know the truth: this is Crossbow Dude: The Many Reasons to Own a Crossbow. Crossbow Dude can do anything with his weapon, and you wonder why we developed guns and nuclear weapons. A crossbow is the swiss-army knife of weapons, if a swiss army knife wasn’t actually a weapon itself.
Dark Burial: Enhanced Edition is mostly just a platformer. There are thirty levels here, and those levels span several game screens. They’re about the length of an original Super Mario Bros level, so about a minute if you were running from one end to the other.
On the way to the exit are some walls, platforms and such that couldn’t have been traversed if Crossbow Dude was just Dude. Ledges are too far or too high for you to cross, so it’s time to whip out the crossbow. One bolt can exist at any time: fire another and the old crossbow bolt disappears. So, it’s all about making a precise shot and then benefiting from that shot.
As mentioned, that takes the form of lodging bolts into walls so you can player-create some platforms. You can’t just lodge them into any old wall, however: you have to be aiming for something soft, so that means more worn areas of the wall, or hanging corpses. We began to feel sorry for those corpses. In life, they were clearly tortured and eventually killed. In death, they became ladders.
It also means hitting platforms with bolts, so that they can be nudged into more suitable positions. One platform might be too close to you, and too far away from the end-goal of the level, so it’s the simple task of hitting it with bolt after bolt until it’s where you want. Isaac Newton is probably turning in his grave (which we would clearly hit with a crossbow bolt and use as a ladder).
It’s not just about the platforming, as there’s combat, too. Enemies have a habit of lurching towards you without any thought of their own well-being. So, you have to hit bats (swooping, harder to hit), spiders (stock-still until you get close) and skeletons (throwing their own projectiles) before they hit you. They’re rarely more difficult than anticipating them before they kill you, as you are always faster and better armed than they are.
Bosses, however, make things a tad more even. Witches and giants have very simple attack patterns that you have to evade, before tossing crossbow bolts between their eyes. They don’t take more than a dozen hits, so it’s mostly about conserving your health (or lack of it: one hit means death in Dark Burial: Enhanced Edition) and attacking once they’re vulnerable. We’d probably rate them as a three out of ten on the challengometer: they never really trouble you.
Before we get onto verdicts, it’s worth noting how failure works in Dark Burial: Enhanced Edition. You have lives and continues, but once those have been exhausted, it’s game over man. Except it kind of isn’t. You can access the Level Select screen on the main game’s menu, and restart from any of the bosses. It’s a small punishment for copping it, but it’s also so minor that we wondered why Dark Burial had to have lives, continues and game overs at all. When the punishment is so lightweight, couldn’t we have just carried on from where we left off?
All in all, Dark Burial: Enhanced Edition is one of those serviceable but throwaway budget games (and it is extremely budget, at £4.19) that might appeal to a few crowds. It’s 1000 Gamerscore for an hour’s work, which isn’t bad, and you don’t have to reach the game’s ending to fill your boots. If that’s how you play games, then Dark Burial: Enhanced Edition clearly fills a purpose.
It’s also got a single idea which it mines for everything it’s got. Every conceivable thing you can do with a crossbow, you can do here. There’s a joy to be had in that: being given a toy, and trying out all the ways it can be used. Dark Burial: Enhanced Edition doesn’t have any particularly imaginative or convoluted levels to try it out in, but firing bolts into everything and seeing what they do has a visceral satisfaction.
If you are in either of these groups, we would ask that we give you a warning. Sometimes, the joy of prodding things with bolts gets undermined by the awkwardness of aiming them. Often, you need to position a bolt in a very precise portion of wall. Too low, and you won’t be able to reach the top. Too high, and you won’t be able to reach it yourself. So, you’re Goldilocks-ing it, trying to get it just right. But getting it just right is a pain, often with a bit of luck stirred in. You are trying to aim a bolt at a specific moment in your jump, and then missing, missing, missing.
The same goes for some enemies. Hitting a bat? Get prepared to dodge and jump out of the way as your bolt goes above and below them, leaving you exposed. The floaty firing and lack of accuracy constantly gets in the way, and when the only thing you’re really doing is using your crossbow, you get exposed to the issues pretty darn frequently.
You soon adapt to Dark Burial: Enhanced Edition’s quirks, and even begin to master the old crossbow, but – by then – it’s over. The thirty levels here are only enough to fill an afternoon, being no more than ninety minutes long, so you’re finishing up by the time you’re really getting used to the clumsy aiming. Difficulty is skewed low, mainly because it’s acutely aware of its one-hit-kills system, and doesn’t want you to be dying all the time. So, Dark Burial: Enhanced Edition will very quickly be behind you, and we’re not convinced you will remember it.
Dark Burial: Enhanced Edition is an action-platformer that’s fallen madly, deeply in love with its crossbow. You can do anything with it, and that multipurposeness has a certain amount of glee attached. Fight with it, jump with it, solve puzzles with it. As a devil’s advocate, though, it’s got some fiddliness attached too, and lodging a bolt in exactly the right spot steals away some of that glee.
If you’re in a mood for a cheapo indie that absolutely runs away with its single mechanic, then Dark Burial: Enhanced Edition may be enough. But be prepared for the crossbow aiming to make you, well, cross.
You can buy Dark Burial: Enhanced Edition from the Xbox Store
