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Dark Envoy is an action RPG whose setting combines fantasy and sci-fi. The main characters, Malakai and Kaela, are a pair of adventurers who are also brother and sister. When their home town is attacked by a mysterious group, they must embark on a quest to find those responsible.

Gameplay (low quality)

• The player will control a party of 4 characters, chosen from the 2 protagonists plus 5 companions. Each character has a starting class of either warrior, mage, rogue, or engineer, and each class has 3 more subclasses which provide various active and passive abilities.
• The character creator will let you chose a class for Malakai and Kaela, in addition to providing some limited options to customise their appearance.
• Combat is real time, but you can activate a slow motion mode which allows more control over moving characters around the map, targeting enemies with spells, and managing ability cooldowns.
• Enemies include Human/Elven warriors/mages/archers, spiders, fire/ice/lightning elementals, robots, turrets, etc.
• While the store page describes Dark Envoy as a tactical RPG, I actually think it plays more like an action RPG. The combat system feels much closer to Diablo or Grim Dawn than Banner Saga or Baldur’s Gate. It also has a similar loot drop system where you’ll regularly find tons of new weapons, armour, rings, etc, which have different rarities and provide slightly different bonuses to several different types of stats.
• Most fights will begin with a few enemies visible on the map, followed by multiple extra waves of enemies spawning from portals which are usually located in several places all around the combat arena. This makes any attempts at tactical positioning useless. Its basically impossible to stop enemies getting into melee range of your weaker characters. (This reminds me of why Dragon Age 2’s combat was so disappointing).
• I played on normal difficulty and found it to be very unbalanced. During the first half of the game, I was often barely surviving, with my whole party low on health and mana, waiting for abilities to cooldown, while yet more waves of enemies spawned to eventually overwhelm me. I even had to abandon a couple of quests and come back later when I was stronger.
• However, the second half of the game was significantly easier. The turning point was when I levelled up enough for my combat medic to acquire the healing crystals ability, which is very cheap to cast with a short cooldown, and can heal the whole party in a wide area of effect. After this I almost never lost a fight because all I had to do was keep the party within the healing area. Its kind of crazy how a single ability can make the difference between “extremely frustrating” and “its so easy now that I don’t even have to think anymore”.
• In addition to the main story and companion quests, you can visit randomly generated maps which have no related quest, but just provide an opportunity to get extra loot and XP.

Story (low quality)

• The main story gets off to a poor start because it just kind of drops the player in without providing much background detail on the history of the world. There’s a conflict between two factions, the league and the empire, but I didn’t really know who they were until I’d completed a few quests for them.
• The siblings’ story gets more interesting after a certain twist is finally revealed (which should be quite obvious if you’re paying attention during an early dungeon, but it takes ages for the characters in game to figure out what is happening).
• Some quests allow the player to make choices such as which faction to side with, whether to kill an enemy or let them go, arrest a criminal or accept a bribe, which can have some minor consequences later.
• Companions only have one personal quest each, which means their stories don’t really go anywhere.
• Most of the voice acting was average quality with the exception of the actress of Kaela, who I thought put in a good performance.

Technical (low quality)

• It took me 33 hours to complete the main story and all companion quests.
• Some maps have frame drops into the 40s during combat (RTX 3080, i7-12700K, 32GB DDR4, 1440p).
• Anti-aliasing options are poor. I could often see the edges of scenery flickering in the background of cutscenes.
• The game never crashed, but I encountered various bugs which each happened a few times. They aren’t game breaking but they can be annoying.
• Sometimes during combat, a companion character would disappear from the UI which meant I couldn’t select their abilities.
• Many combat encounters use a red forcefield to trap you in an area until you’ve killed all the enemies. If there’s another group of enemies nearby on the other side of the forcefield, the combat won’t end but your party and the enemies can’t attack each other because of the forcefield. I would have to retreat quite far back across the map until those enemies “forgot” about me, to end the combat and make the forcefield disappear.
• During one quest (in a dungeon involving holograms), the dialogue audio cut out several times, missing the last word or two of each sentence.

Recommendation

Unfortunately, Dark Envoy doesn’t really do anything well. Combat is either frustratingly hard or pointlessly easy. Story lacks detail and only really gets interesting close to the end. Performance is limited by frame drops and bugs.
Ultimately there are so many better games available that I have to recommend avoiding Dark Envoy.