Dusk (Switch)

If you had a mixing pot of the best shooters of the 90’s, the speed and look of Quake, arenas straight from Redneck Rampage, the exploration of Hexen and Heretic, Doom’s vibe and absolutely stellar soundtrack, you’d have an essence of what’s been brought to the table in Dusk.

Firstly released in 2018, the boomers went wild. Now in October 2021, we have a fully fledged port on the Switch. Before you think of the Switch’s lesser power, let me put this forward to you. The port hasn’t been outsourced to another team, the lads at New Blood have done this themselves, starting way back in 2019. The Switch port of Dusk has full 60fps in both docked and undocked modes. We’ve got full controller compatability with gyro support, so you can even do backflips if you so wish, even a FOV slider so you purists can play it as perfectly as you want.

I played through the game with a pro controller and it felt perfect, the controls work really well on the controller but I felt a lot less comfortable on using joycons on an undocked Switch, I had to turn the sensitivity up pretty rapidly but once that was sorted it felt hugely better.

The game itself plays as simple as you need, get to the end of the level. But it’s never just that easy, you’ve got all the familiar tropes here, loads of enemies, some straight pulled out of 80’s slasher movies, killer Scarecrows, mages, chainsaw guys, soldiers, demon goats, Giant alligators, and that’s just from the first 2 chapters. Each map starts off pretty simple, but by the later levels, you’re going through giant sprawling levels, keys to find, hundreds of secret areas and loads of room for mobs upon mobs of enemies.

Visually it’s as good as it needs to be, Dusk hasn’t strayed too far from the devs other titles, absolutely straight from the 90’s, low poly levels, taken from generally normal locations to start with, farms, streets, warehouses. The further you get, the more deviant we get, with the third chapter taking us through some absolute hellscapes, Lovecraftian inspiration is rife here, each chapter has it’s own distinct look and feel too.

There’s 3 chapters to the game each with 11 levels each ,the further you progress in each chapter you’ll fight more and more bosses, Chapter 1 has 3 over it’s 11 levels, then 5 bosses and 7 respectively. These obviously progress in difficulty the further you get on, but you’re always close to some health packs or ammo packs. We also have some endless levels where you fight wave upon wave of enemy, I didn’t play much of this but it was still fun, the Switch version does include an extra level with a subtle Mario nod.

The game sounds absolutely killer too, we’re talking sounding pretty much perfect, the weapons sound nice and meaty, enemies and any spoken lines sound great. The soundtrack might even be as good as Doom 2016, with haunting tones as you wander, with guitars shredding through your speakers the second you get into a mob fight, the amount of times I wanted to spinkick my enemies listening to the riffs pumping through my headset was pretty high.
With it being a total boomer shooter, there’s loads of throwbacks to classic shooters hidden away, my personal favourite was the game telling me “I don’t have time to play with myself”… If you know, you know.

I was originally told about how good Dusk is, but for some reason I was always a bit skeptical, throwback shooters are usually pretty rough (I’m still salty about how average Strafe felt), but now I’m finally here with Dusk I can see and believe the hype. The game absolutely knows it’s roots, respects them, and cements it’s place in Boomer lore as one of the best.