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Simon & Schuster Interactive (SSI)’s Darkened Skye can be found on your Cube after being released as a PC title. You play as Skye, the heroine who the game was named after, who needs to save the world from the evil Lord Necroth. Darkened Skye proves to be a mixed bag.
Darkened Skye features a fantasy story revolving around Skittles, the popular candy. You take control of Skye, a heroine who finds a weird orange stone and takes it to a wise person to observe it. You are told that the mysterious object is a Skittle, an object that allows you to cast magic spells. You aren’t reading wrong though, its Skittles. The same candy you can find in your local grocery store. In the most blatant use of videogame advertising, Skittles and “Taste the Rainbow” show up during the game.
With this in mind you must travel through five lands, collecting the Skittles and as a result, increasing your magician skills. This will ultimately lead to you fighting and defeating Lord Necroth, the game’s evil villain who wants all the Skittles for himself. Surprisingly, the use of Skittles doesn’t bring down the game’s story. The dialogue is very well-written and often times humorous. Clever play on words runs rampant as well.
The gameplay won’t shock you, and maintains comfortably as “average” during the game. Darkened Skye doesn’t try to change things up or contribute to the rather stale 3D platform genre. The controls are loose and sometimes feel light and floaty. Loose controls sometime fit the game but they don’t belong here. The L and R buttons’ sensitivity isn’t used as they only respond if they are fully clicked.
Combat plays a decent role in the game, even though, it is rather stale and button-mash friendly. Blocking moves isn’t used at all and combat revolves around you running like a maniac around your enemies with the attack button held down. Enemies don’t stop attacking you as you run, which gives you very little reason to sharpen your combat and stay away from the cheap attacks. The magic system helps combat a bit, but there is really no need to use it when you can overcome the enemies much quicker.
The graphics are a step below the Gamecube’s more recent offerings. While they were fine on the PC a year ago, they look very dated here. Characters have average textures and are blocky. The animations are rather rigid and stiff and there are plenty of missing animations. The environments are rather plain and the textures are blurry. Darkened Skye could of easily passed as a superb game on the Nintendo 64.
Soundwise, the game performs a bit better. The background music isn’t particularly good and they get annoying, fast. Sound effects don’t fare much better, with the same ones used over and over. Voice acting saves the game’s audio, though. The dialogue is very good and Skye is voiced by Linda Larkin, the same person who performed the voice of Princess Jasmine on Aladdin.
Darkend Skye proves to be a novel attempt in the action-adventure genre by Simon and Schuster Interactive. Some more polish and this game could be better but currently, it’s average. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Jan 20, 2003
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