Dark and Darker - Three players congregate to Dark And Darker Gold heal one another in a torchlit dungeon
Dark and Darker's first-person melee combat is a bit like Skyrim—slash, step back, slash, block, get hit with an arrow despite blocking, repeat. It means I spend a lot of time doing that W and S waltz with a skeleton while knowing I may stumble backwards into an enemy player (or hell, just a closed door) and have my run cut short. Weapons have a series of automatic combos indicated by your reticle—diagonal right, diagonal left, then a thrust for the sword a Fighter starts with—so it's above the monotony of yon Tamriel melee, but not as skill-based as Chivalry 2.
That's the common denominator in my complaints so far. Dark and Darker's punishing enemy damage, from AI and players, demands a lot more skill than its combat system allows me to exert. This is no Chivalry 2, nor a FromSoftware game. Every fight I've been in so far has been clumsy—unwieldy brutes slowly sidestepping while weapons collide with walls, barrels, and sometimes what I was actually aiming at. The fact that there's no way to fully block an attack (at least with base-level gear) means the first one to land a hit is probably going to win, and so far, that means archers are very powerful. I've died often, and though I'm prone to hubris, even I feel the skill ceiling pressing down on the back of my neck.
Dark and Darker - a skeleton with a bow aims at a player holding a sword and shield.
Dark and Darker's clunky brawls make me a bit wistful for the FPS games I dislike, in fact. My preferred sword and sorcery genre doesn't have the same history of competing corporations squeezing yearly online PvP releases out of a popular series. There are few accepted standards for melee combat in the way of commonly understood "good gunfeel." I want to imagine what Dark and Darker would play like if the likes of Torn Banner, FromSoft buy Darker Gold, and TaleWorlds had a decade-long arms race over sword combat dominance in the 2010s.