Villordsutch reviews The Dark on ZX Spectrum…
With the recent re-energising of DOOM and with Quake making an appearance at E3 2016 [Follow all of our E3 2016 coverage here] it seems the classic FPS shooters are once again on the rise again, so with this it’s time to really take it old school as we look at a “Homebrew” FPS shooter on the ZX Spectrum that quite frankly is rather impressive.
The Dark was released originally back in 1997 and now its creator Oleg Origin has given it a well-earned fresh lick of paint and dropped it back on the homebrew market for people to download for free.
You play Alexander, armed with vengeance plus a trident, and you’re setting off back to reclaim the lands from the Dark Forces that massacred your people decades earlier. With pick-ups, armour and numerous enemies in your path this is going to be a bloody path of revenge.
The Dark is an excellent looking game, more so considering that it runs on the 48K Spectrum, starting with digitised speech and some excellent 8-bit artwork, you are thrown straight into a “tutorial” maze, before the real game begins and then it’s no holds barred.
Yes, there are a few issues which include the slightly awkward controls, which don’t really help when you have to line-up directly with the maze inhabitants, this and you can get easily lost within the maze during a battle due to the colours of the walls. However the positives delivered by Oleg easily outweigh the negatives – it looks fantastic, it plays great, it’s massive and you can’t believe it can run on a ZX Spectrum.
The Dark is a very worthy download so get to playing it today. You can download The Dark for Oleg’s website here.
Originally published June 16, 2016. Updated May 10, 2023.
