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At its core, Conquest Dark takes the fast-paced fun combat of ARPGs, weaves in a lot of different roguelike elements, and wraps it all up in Vampire Survivors-style overarching gameplay and progression. Usually when a game tries to mash so many different genres together into one, it ends up sacrificing at least one of the genres along the way. But developer Eldritch Sword Games has managed to keep all three genres entertaining and the overall experience a worthwhile one.
Each session of Conquest Dark throws you into a new ritual in which you spawn in as a naked man or woman and have to choose which race and class combo you want to play as for that “run”. At first, your options are limited to just Humans and either the melee-focused Barbarian or ranged Hunter. Thankfully, each run starts with a couple of encroaching enemy skeletons, one of which always has a weapon embedded into its skull. Killing it presents you with your next choice: which weapon do you want to use for this ritual? When first beginning in Conquest Dark there are only a couple of options: a 2-Handed weapon that features a wider attack arc with slower but heavier hitting attacks, or Dual-Wielding 1-Handed weapons for a smaller attack window but overall faster attacks.
In classic Vampire Survivors bullet hell meets roguelike fashion, enemies continue to spawn in the ritual arena around you, all focused on trying to take you out. As you kill them, you’ll earn experience that levels you up, presenting you with various upgrade options to improve your killing ability. Some options are class proficiencies, like amplifying the bonus health or critical hit damage you deal with your weapons, why others are actual abilities themselves like my favorite ability that makes your character consistently spin around dealing AoE damage in a big circle. For ARPG fans, it’s Whirlwind from Diablo. For Vampire Survivor fans, it’s a prettier and fancier Garlic.
As you progress through the ritual, more enemies will fill the screen, and they will all get stronger. Eventually, mini-bosses and actual big boi bosses will join the ritual, requiring you to change up your strategy based on the boss. Some will simply hit harder, others will hurl ranged weapons at you that you must now dodge while trying to cleave through hordes of skeletons, others will just be beefy tanks you have to slowly chip away at. Killing these minibosses will net you some gear which further increases the key stats to your character and its class.
Of course, you’re going to eventually die; such is the life of a champion tasked with partaking in Conquest Dark’s rituals. But with each death, you earn various currencies that allow you to upgrade different aspects of your characters moving forward, including damage, damage resistance, and more. Each run, you’ll be a little stronger and able to push a little further. You’ll also unlock new races, classes, weapons and abilities, so each successive run you have more ways of trying to survive as long as possible in the ritual.
In terms of gameplay, your primary job is to control the movements of your character. It’s like Vampire Survivors in that you only have control of your movements, with your character automatically attacking. You have the option to switch between auto-aim in real-time, allowing you to target your character’s automatic attacks and abilities towards your cursor, or letting the game automatically aim them at nearby targets for you. It may seem like a simple approach at first, only controlling the movement. But as you add abilities to your run, and bigger stronger enemies start to spawn with a variety of attack types, it quickly becomes a fast-paced and intense challenge trying to manage everything at once while staying alive.
Conquest Dark is currently in Early Access, which honestly is pretty damn impressive. There’s already a ton of content with a handful of races and classes, weapons, abilities, and a big map for you to explore and progress through as you unlock new rituals with their own modifiers and rewards. Even more impressive is that Conquest Dark is solo-developed. As such you should obviously temper your expectations a bit with its update cadence, but honestly, even the content that is already there feels more than most EA titles.
Oh, and Conquest Dark is only $9.99 on Steam for its Early Access launch.. Definitely worth the asking price, especially if you’re a fan of either (or all) of the three genres Conquest Dark slams together.
