Just when I thought that there’s no more room for innovation in the match-3 genre, in comes Darkin, by the Berlin-based indie development team Ten Foiled Hats. This match-3 game is set in a vampiric theme and they put it to very good use, not only aesthetically but also in terms of gameplay mechanics that somehow manages to take the stale match-3 experience and turn it into a surprisingly refreshing AND exciting one.
First up, players get to choose their clans (Reapers, Night Templar’s or Assassins) and each of these clans come with their very own clan-specific abilities. Now, these in-game abilities, while spicing things up quite a bit, are just tip of the iceberg in terms of the number of innovations introduced by Ten Foiled Hats in the game. The match-3 element of selecting tiles of the same type gets tweaked in which players can select the same type of tiles as long as they are connected up, down and even diagonally, which makes for really long stretches.
Each turn, enemy tiles may or not appear on screen, and as long as they are on the game board, the player’s hit points will be deducted depending on the type of enemy tiles. There are also 20 devious bosses who can lay down even more pain per turn, so take them out!. Connecting teeth tiles to these enemy tiles will end up consuming said enemies while collecting Blood Coin and Dark Energy tiles will allow players to unlock power-ups. Heart tiles on the other hand allow players to regain HP lost due to the existence of enemy tiles.
Darkin comes with three game modes with the first one being Almost Eternal, which lives up to its name in a sense that just as long as you still have HP left, you can carry on playing indefinitely. Bloody Countdown will test players over a course of a 100 turns while Sunrise Survival is a race against the clock.
I’ve been playing Darkin over the weekend and it has been crazy fun with its vampiric theme and awesome gameplay mechanics which have made match-3 interesting again. I highly recommend Darkin and Nineoverten.com rates it at a 5 out of 5. The game is available on the iTunes App Store as a universal app for both iPhone and iPad at a price of USD 2.99, check it out over here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/darkin/id794915875?ls=1&mt=8
A review code was provided to Nineoverten.com for the purpose of this review.
