I almost let this particular game slip completely under my radar, but when I saw some screenshots of it, I knew I absolutely had to play it. I just hoped that the game would live up to the aesthetic. Mahluk: Dark Demon [$0.99] is a hack and slash platformer in the vein of Goblin Sword [$1.99] and Sword of Xolan [$0.99] with a super dark art style in which the foreground is completely silhouetted. It?s not dark in the artsy Limbo [$4.99] kind of way, but more the heavy metal crap-sack demon infested Dark Souls style world way, which I am all about. And while the aesthetic is far and away the best thing this game has going for it, it plays pretty decently as well.
Developed by a couple of Turkish dudes (explaining the handful of spelling and grammar goofs) with one voice actor for the bookend story cut-scenes using the JNA Mobile platformer game kit for Unity, you can hopefully see why this probably won?t be the most polished game on the App Store. Having said that, what is here is actually very impressive for something made by so few people. It?s a pretty standard retro influenced 3 life platformer. The retro influence really comes through in the design, eschewing some modern conventions of convenience to make you earn that victory the hard way. Unfortunately the game is mostly hard because of some clunky controls and collision detection, but it's not so bad that it ruins the game. I?m going to talk about the cool stuff first, though.
One of the first things I thought o...