Heart of Darkness proves that 2D isn't dead.
The main character in Heart of Darkness isn't a soldier, an alien or even a secret agent. No, he's just a little boy named Andy, whose dog Whiskey gets kidnapped by evil shadow creatures. Armed with a rifle that shoots electricity, Andy goes after these creatures to save Whiskey and stop the Master of Darkness.
While the game is in 2D, there's no side scrolling here. Every screen in the game is in a Prince of Persia fashion. This means that every screen in the game is static with no scrolling whatsoever. When you exit a screen, all that happens is that the new screen fades in from the one you just exited, so there's no need for you to worry that you might bump into an enemy because you're running too fast or for not paying attention.
Controlling Andy is about as difficult as stacking newspapers on top of each other. Aside from the D-pad, everything you need to use in order to complete the game is the four symbol buttons in front of the controller. No hard matter, in other words.
Graphically, Heart of Darkness varies. The graphics during cut-scenes are beautiful and detailed, but during actual gameplay they look more pixilated then the original Grand Theft Auto. Then again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
There are a few things about Heart of Darkness that could have been improved. It can sometimes take almost 30 minutes for you to get past a certain part since you die constantly from shadow creatures, traps or from falling off a cliff. The game tries to solve this by giving you hints on what to do after dying a certain amount of times, but sometimes you will die almost 20 times and still not get any hints at all. Even when you do get one, it might not be the hint you're looking for.
The 5 years of developing Heart of Darkness hasn't gone to waste despite some flaws. Even if 2D seems outdated today, both old and new school gamers will surely find something about this game that is good enough for it to be highly entertaining.