Reviews
[Review] ‘DUSK’ Evokes the Spirit of Classic Shooters, But is So Much More Than That
It’s time to practice that bunny-hop and strafe so you can slay a legion of evil cultists in this ingenious throwback to the lightning-paced shooters of yesteryear. Read our DUSK review to see why it’s one of the best games of 2018.
This past week saw the 25th anniversary of DOOM, perhaps the most important shooter of all time. So it’s almost as ballsy as it is timely that New Blood Interactive released a game that is a celebration of that era of shooters at heart. This is no desperate attempt to cash in on an established name though, because DUSK is so much more than a simple throwback. It’s a pulsating blast ’em up in its own right.
From the 90’s 3D visuals to the chugging metal soundtrack, at a glance, DUSK looks and sounds very much like it could have been part of that Golden Age of PC shooters that saw Doom Guy and Duke Nukem become genre icons. There’s no auto-healing, you begin the game practically defenseless, and you move at a blistering pace. To play just a portion of its opening level it even feels like a trip back in time. If you had to place it, DUSK could be the missing link between DOOM‘s speedy corridor-shooting, and the Gothic openness of Quake. As you delve deeper into DUSK, you will discover that it has a few tricks from beyond that era too.
The plot is secondary here, but it does at least accommodate the set dressing. It involves a satanic cult of sorts and sees you pitted against everything from bag-headed, chainsaw-wielding maniacs to invisible goat demons as you take in a surprisingly varied amount of scenery. Despite the lightness of a blatant narrative, there’s still an impressive amount of environmental storytelling that gives you an indication of what to do and what may be coming.
The environmental storytelling is unquestionably helped by some cracking level design that only improves as DUSK goes on. There’s a pleasing mixture of wide open arenas and winding corridors to each stage and while there’s a measure of backtracking and key-grabbing to be had, the design ensures that it takes on a modern Souls-esque pattern of looping back round to your starting point instead of simply trudging back the way you came.
Along the way, you’ll be doing plenty of shooting of course, and DUSK‘s shooting is pretty damn satisfying, to say the least. The speed at which DUSK plays is shown to be necessary as the enemies can materialize from anywhere and often in great numbers. What follows is a hi-octane dance of death, where you dodge and weave through a hail of gunfire, picking off each individual threat with its corresponding weapon (it’s phenomenal how naturally you end up switching between weapons for each situation).
What initially seems like an intimidating one versus many contest turns into an almost strategic evisceration of the enemy, as you corral swarms of nasties into the path of something explosive to gain a high bullet to death ratio. It’s simply sublime to experience. It’s an exhilarating reminder of how intense shooters can be, and proof that photorealistic/stylish visuals aren’t a necessity to make that happen. DUSK runs butter-smooth too, so the action rarely suffers for iffy framerate.
That gunplay lesson the game gives you in the early stages really comes in handy later as the levels become more eccentric and wild. At one point you end up firing your way through a violent interpretation of an Escher painting and it’s as bonkers as it is effective. The opening chapter ends up feeling a tad ordinary by comparison as things get crazier and crazier up until a highly satisfying final boss encounter that acts as a fine payoff for the deliciously hellish six or seven hours you’ve gone through.
If there’s anything close to a downside then it’s clearly the multiplayer mode. It’s not to say that it’s anything terrible. While the main game is a grisly tour-de-force fusion of old and new, the multiplayer is almost completely a throwback with little in the way of a modern flourish to it. It’s functional, enjoyable, and sadly that’s all there is to it. It seems daft to suggest a competent yet unspectacular multiplayer offering sours a cracking single player campaign, but it does take the shine off ever so slightly.
What matters most is that DUSK is still a fantastic shooter despite this. It channels the twitchy, quick feeling of PC shooters of 20-odd years ago and somehow makes it play like it never went out of style by peppering in a few novel touches. In an age of photo-realistic visuals and painstakingly-modeled guns, DUSK is proof positive that good old-fashioned shooters can still be relevant and thrilling decades after their heyday. Especially when handled as efficiently as New Blood Interactive has managed.
DUSK review code for PC provided by the publisher.
DUSK is out now on Steam PC.
It’s a day of the month ending in Y, and that means it’s time for another killer shark film. Why? Because they’re inexpensive to make, play into an easy fear, and keep finding audiences willing to give them a spin. The Bay is the latest entry in the shark attack subgenre, and while it’s noticeably better than last month’s Chum, it still struggles to barely stay afloat.
Emma (Francesca Eastwood) and Lani (Dani Oliveros) are best friends who’ve traveled to Thailand for a destination wedding, and a chance encounter at the buffet table leads to an unexpected adventure. Mandal (Alexander Wraith) is a friendly, knowledgeable transplant who connects with nature and makes a living by offering boat tours through the area’s scenic waterways. The trips culminate with the opportunity for tourists to witness a shark feeding with local tiger sharks. The tourists aren’t meant to be the food, obviously, but sometimes accidents happen.
The Bay checks off most of the subgenre’s expected beats – an attractive location, an iffy ensemble of characters, a series of poor choices – but it does a few things differently along the way. For one thing, while we see plenty of sharks in the build-up, the first attack doesn’t happen until past the film’s midpoint. Writer/director Phil Volken fills the time leading up to that attack with engaging enough character beats, some genuine suspense, and an abundance of dialogue about how sharks aren’t typically a threat to people – or threats like people. “Sharks hunt,” says Mandal, “humans kill.”
It’s a bit of foreshadowing, perhaps, but it’s also the film’s presiding theme. Sharks don’t want to hurt or kill humans, but “mistakes happen.” Mandal offers up numerous eco-friendly spiels about the role sharks play in the environment, how overhunting could lead to disaster, and how humans are the ones invading their territory. “Don’t act like prey,” and you won’t be bitten, eaten, digested, and shat out by a shark. Pretty simple, if you think about it.
Trouble starts when they toss a chunk of meat into the water attached to a chain and a large female tiger shark gets caught up in it. Mandal’s sidekick, a local man named Ruhan (Ta’imua), panics and starts stabbing at the thrashing creature. He has a history of being bitten by a shark and is clearly frightened, and as the situation worsens, he becomes a far more active threat to the others’ safety than the actual sharks. That character type is pretty common in these films, but it’s a curious choice to make the film’s sole indigenous member of the ensemble the morally weak link.
To be clear, Ta’imua is playing a local but isn’t actually Thai. He is, however, Hawaiian, and The Bay was filmed off Oahu, meaning he’s the only indigenous representation on both counts. The other three characters, all Americans, are brave and willing to risk their own safety for the group, leaving only Ruhan to put a face to the cruel, selfish humans mentioned earlier in the film. It’s certainly a choice!
His performance is somewhat stifled by the desire to make him seem menacing, but it’s passable. The others are equally okay as performers, but it’s only Oliveros’ Dani who stands apart as a spirited individual worthy of viewer fist pumps. Cinematographer Helge Gerull delivers some attractive landscape shots destined to make you consider a Hawaiian vacation, and composer Gad Emile Zeitune finds some effective aural backdrops for the film’s teasingly emotional moments.
Then there’s the sharks. A major drag on the subgenre these days is the use of cheap CG effects (including the abysmal use of A.I. in Chum), but The Bay sidesteps that problem for the most part. There are real sharks here, lots of them, but they appear to be solely present via stock footage edited into the film. Some CG is used here and there, too, with shots being comped together to tighten the proximity between humans and sharks. Most effective, arguably, are the practical effects used to create fins cutting through the water near the characters.
There’s a sense of grounded reality to the shark kills, and while they’re less showy, they’re weightier as a result. Wounded bodies drift away, and the moment where shark nibbles turn into ferocious feasting feels more inevitable and affecting than sudden or scary. The sole exception to the general quality of those kills is the film’s final shark encounter, which doubles down on the poor choices by pairing a silly CG beat with some poorly matched stock footage.
Pretty much every shark attack movie lives or dies on its presentation of the sharks themselves. There are exceptions, of course, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws being chief among them – everything about that film, from the writing and acting to the directing and editing, helps make it a masterpiece despite the mechanical shark looking goofy as hell outside of the water – but The Bay isn’t Jaws. It’s not even Jaws: The Revenge. Its live sharks are mildly effective, though, and give it a subdued realism that will likely appeal to viewers averse to CG intrusions. Will that be enough to win them over, though?
“When you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain… and not necessarily at the top,” says an opening onscreen quote from Jacques Cousteau, and something similar could be said for shark attack movies in general. When you make one of these movies, you enter a well-trodden and densely populated subgenre… and you’re all but guaranteed to not be at or even near the top. The Bay is closer to the ocean floor than the water’s surface, and while that still puts it above the bulk of the genre, it’s probably not enough of a reason to step foot in these waters.
The Bay opens in theaters and on demand on July 17, 2026.
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