Dark Thrones (PS4)

In an endless runner, your goal is to keep your character alive as long as possible, keeping the run going by dodging dangers as best you can. Despite the genre name, it’s expected eventually you’ll come up short either because of you didn’t react in time or lacked some useful upgrade or power-up. In Dark Thrones though, the genre name can feel almost literal, the dangers before you so easily overcome that you could likely keep a run going forever, or at least until you pass out or lose power in real life.

 

Turning the game on and seeing the generic mobile game interface is the first clue that there wasn’t much thought put into making Dark Thrones, but when you start playing, you’ll notice the game does not even give any context for what you’re doing. You’re running through a snowy land occasionally slashing your dagger at armored skeletons, but the screen that does pop up should you lose implies the floating gold coins you are grabbing are being stolen, even calling you a thief. Funnily enough, this does contrast a bit with the actual explanation for the game’s events found on the PlayStation store page. Dark Thrones stars an assassin named Dark whose current task is just, a wave of undead appearing atop a wall that was meant to protect the people of the land. The game’s name makes a bit more sense after seeing this paper thin justification, the situation and backgrounds meant to evoke Game of Thrones and its massive Wall in the north that protected against an undead army.

In Dark Thrones though, each skeletal soldier is easily dispatched with a single knife swipe meaning they’re not too threatening, but since they are functionally endless, it’s a quest with no end. Instead, Dark will forever be running to the right, the player needing to time double jumps, slides, and dagger slashes to get over stacked crates and pits, under barriers, and past the undead who will not even attack but instead just hurt him should he run right into them. Coins emblazoned with skulls float in your path to be easily collected, but there are also two power-ups that appear periodically. Grab the double up coin and the money you gather will be slightly more valuable or grab the shield and you’ll be invulnerable to all danger but a drop down a pit for a while. The shield essentially means you can stop paying attention for a while and just run through solid objects, and since only rarely will the path ahead of you suddenly have an upper platform you can jump up onto for better rewards, you really don’t have to do much when invincible.

 

You might want to avoid grabbing two power-ups at once though, since the game seems indecisive on whether that means they’re active at the same time, the new one supplants the other, or you get the new power-up but it lasts for the amount of time you had left on the previous one. It’s certainly not the only glitch, sometimes enemies and gold appear suddenly and one time I saw a skeleton just sink down into the ground, and if you pause the game mid-jump, you’ll get to see Dark fall out of the air before you can resume. These little issues might be bothersome if the game was at all difficult, but mostly they just mean you might hit a small snag easily recovered from since the moment you take damage, healing hearts start appearing so you can make up for the rare time you might fall for hazards that aren’t really placed to be difficult to overcome.

You might be tempted to just run as far as you can and see what happens on your first go, but beyond building up a good amount of gold and setting a distance record, there’s not much reason to do so. Instead, Dark Thrones tries to make up for its lack of difficulty by laying out Trophy challenges. To earn a specific PlayStation trophy you’ll be given three tasks to complete, and while you can view all trophy requirements from the get-go, you must do them in order, meaning ones like gathering a certain amount of gold or buying specific upgrades must be saved until you’re actually on the right step. Most tasks are pretty basic, things like reaching a certain distance, getting injured by certain threats, or collecting specific amounts of power-ups and gold. However, one that will ensure the task takes quite a while are trophies that insist on requiring deaths and continues. If you do die on a run, likely on purpose to get back and view the trophy requirements since you can’t view them during play, you can continue your run by paying a bit of your gold. If you continue multiple times in the same run, the price increases more and more, and for certain trophies, you will need to do multiple continues and burn through your gold hoard to do so. Essentially this means you must do more of the mindless running to just build up to throwing yourself to your doom multiple times in a row, the task not making the game more interesting but certainly adding some required runtime if you do wish to get something more out of it than true endless running.

 

As mentioned, there are upgrades to be purchased, although the trophy system encourages you to wait to buy them or else you might be tasked with buying an upgrade you already have and thus be stuck in terms of progress. However, the upgrades hold very little value, their effects understated and not even speeding up the process of earning gold or completing tasks all that much. You can upgrade your health which isn’t really necessary due to the barely present difficulty, but the other two available upgrades just make the armor and double coins power-ups last longer. Sadly, it’s not to such a degree that coin collection can be done at a rapid pace, and in fact, the upgrades themselves become so pricey that you’ll likely need to do long dull runs to afford them once it comes time to do so for a trophy. Essentially, the difference between your first run and your final run with all the upgrades will just be a few more hearts to take a hit you aren’t likely to sustain anyway and the power-up meter staying on screen longer when you do grab one. All of these ideas barely impact this mind-numbingly boring endless runner, but combined they make it so it’s a game with no excitement and one where progress is not only barely felt, but it does essentially nothing to add to the experience save technically giving you a reason to play it for more than the ten minutes it would take to see there’s nothing substantial to the actual gameplay.

THE VERDICT: Dark Thrones is a truly empty endless runner that doesn’t have a single original thought. Even once you look past it cribbing from Game of Thrones for a story told only on the game’s store page, you end up with a runner with no difficulty scaling so the obstacles that are already too easy to start with never evolve into something even worth facing. The upgrades are negligible and the power-ups are so basic they won’t add any excitement to your run. When success is mostly tied to your willingness to put up with monotony, it’s not even worth putting up with the few hours it takes to clear out its trophies, Dark Thrones only able to elevate itself above the worst of the worst cynical shovelware because at least its glitches don’t really cause true problems if you can bring yourself to play it.

 

And so, I give Dark Thrones for PlayStation 4…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Even for players only interested in the relatively easy PlayStation trophies it offers will find Dark Thrones a rough time. It’s an attention span test because you do need to jump and slash frequently enough you have to pay attention, but the task is so banal and hollow that you will get almost no stimulation from it. You can unfocus your eyes and still likely react in time, your skills not being tested and your reaction times only likely to come up short in the rare time the random item placement might place a barrier you need to hop over beneath a floating platform, and even then you might slip through unscathed despite the jump not looking like it worked. After you notice the pits on the ground that maybe get you the first time you encounter them they never will again, and jumping and attacking are so easily done that even a skeleton atop a box pile is no more threatening than any other obstacle you encounter. Almost every danger you encounter feels like it is as difficult as what you’d find in a normal game’s tutorial, the obstacles feeling less like dangers and more like they’re just there to see if you can do the right simple inputs. Dark Thrones feels like it would be the kind of incredibly cheap game a person feels they can’t complain about since they got it for a dime, but it has yet to go below 2 dollars in price and sells at full price for 9. You’d get more enjoyment out of a dime since you can at least spin, roll, and flip it and find more variance in that activity than Dark Thrones, and while the trophies attempt to add some structure to it, what they truly do is add a reason to do more regular unexceptional running interrupted by the rare moment you do something a bit different like dying intentionally.

 

While endless runners aren’t as popular as they once were, you can still find many better designed ones for free on mobile markets, and since Dark Thrones doesn’t really introduce any new ideas and even lacks many of what might be considered the basics of the genre, it really struggles to justify its existence. It is a bit clear why it exists, potentially to trick Game of Thrones fans or people who might spot it on sale and think it will be at least a generic endless runner with a modicum of challenge to it, but Dark Thrones is like an empty box. It looks like you’re getting something until you open it, and it’s little surprise the game isn’t on Steam with that platform’s generous return policy. You’re meant to buy it on PS4 or Switch, probably never even play it, and later realize it has almost nothing going on, by which point you either can’t return it or it might not be worth the hassle. Rather than shrugging and accepting this game looks the part of a run of the mill endless runner for the minute it might show in a trailer, I felt it prudent to provide a warning to anyone who might be ever tempted to grab it. Even if you are deliberately looking to waste money, there are better ways to waste it than on Dark Thrones.