Darkside Download (1988 Arcade action Game)

In Driller, the Ketars attempted to blow up the moon Mitral, but you stopped them. Now, they have Energy Collection Devices collectively known as EGOs, and hope to stock them up to use towards the Zephyr One device, and direct its energy at the planet Evath, resulting in a catastrophic radiation overload. Your mission is to beam onto their base on the moon Tricuspid, and destroy the EGOs. Destroying one will buy you more of your limited time. The problem is, many are connected to at least 2 others, and those can immediately regenerate, so you must tackle them in an order in which those with only 1 connection are attacked first.

You are inside a space suit, propelled by a Jet Pack with limited fuel, and possess lasers and a shield. Shield energy is limited, but can be recharged through pentagons and rods. In a world viewed through the the Freescape 3D system, you roam the verdant planet of trees, buildings and underground tunnels.

Gameplay in Dark Side has more action than its predecessor, Driller. The Freescape world has a third dimension - due to the jetpack you can leave the ground and look down on the view. You can also rotate the angle and make quick U-turns. You must leave the ground to shoot the active part of an ECD, but the jetpack uses energy at a faster rate, so use this feature sparingly. You must avoid Plexors, which weaken your shield, and deflector devices, which can beam you into prison.

What can I say? Darkside is one of those games most people have never known and probably never will simply because the game isn't offering very good gameplay or anything else. While it does offer a very simple game engine that some might say is used today's games like Quake, Unreal Tournament and similar games Darkside is still far away from a game like Wolfenstein 3D and similar games from that period.

The game isn't taking place in our time. It's more based in a science fiction world with robots but it isn't very easy to get additional info about the game and also in general very hard to figure out what is happening in the game. Furthermore the controls are quite hard. At least for me they didn't make sense and they are placed very weird (the keyboard controls) so you can just move around and shot by using one hand on the keyboard and the mouse with the other which you normally can.

There is one unique feature which also brings in puzzle elements to the game as you have to destroy different things in the correct order and still be within the time frame you have but this is also the only real new thing in the game compared to games in this genre. Darkside have quite decent graphics when you think of when it was developed and the usual beeper sound which was common in this period. Luckily you can easy turn this off.

After the success with Driller, Incentive continued to improve its 3D Freescape™ engine with this fun sci-fi action/adventure set on planet Tricuspid. To prevent the destruction of your world Evath, you must cripple a huge laser device by destroying all its Energy Collection Devices (ECD). Gameplay is a blend of action and puzzle-solving, as you must figure out which ECD to destroy, in what sequence, and within a time limit. The puzzles are better than Incentive's previous games as they are physical puzzles integrated into the 3D gameworld, and the landscape is much more diverse and hides many secrets. Highly recommended to all action buffs.

How to run this game on modern Windows PC?

People who downloaded Darkside have also downloaded:
Darker, Darts (1991), David Wolf: Secret Agent, Dawn Raiders, Dark Castle, Deep Space, Death by Dark Shadows, David's Kong