Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead & BN User Reviews

Customer Experience

Positive experience38.9% of reviews
Neutral16.7% of reviews
Negative experience44.4% of reviews

~ Based on 36 written reviews from the US App Store.

Is Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead & BN Safe?

Not enough ratings yet to assess Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead & BN.

Is Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead & BN Legit?

Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead & BN appears to be a legitimate app. AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead & BN is 80/100.

Based on 80 of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.

Top reviews

Needs bug fixes. Constant crashing!

Am a big fan of the game but the current version of dark days ahead crashes a lot. Even on the main menu the game will randomly close. I have yet to find a single cause, it’s pretty much random.

UI Disaster

First off this game has two purchases options 1. $12.99 yearly subscription and 2. $12.99 buy once play forever. However when you download and launch the game only the yearly subscription is offered and the buy forever option is not available in either the pop up or the main menu and I could not find it anywhere else…..no store link was available in either locations or menus….deceptive and shameful behavior from the dev. Especially since the game is community sourced and free to everyone…..the port for the iPhone obviously takes work so it theoretically makes asking for money, for that work, reasonable…except it’s terrible. Read on for more details.

Side note the subscription is advertised as ongoing update support and the game hasn’t been updated in over a year….and the UI desperately needs fixing.

Second I had to spend an hour and a half just resizing the sidebar so it didn’t eat half the screen the option to change the sidebars layout isn’t available in settings so good luck finding it. Also once you find it and select the best layout….its “compact” btw, you will still need to go into settings and change the values on the terminal width and height, doing both of those things from separate menus will let you have most of your screen, to see the actual games environment.

3rd the UI doesn’t work consistently and is clunky. The biggest offender was the quick hot keys and key bindings, they would change what they do or would become non-responsive (this was not a caps lock issue). Example, in combat the quick actions menu has the * key mapped to cycle targets…it worked once but after firing my gun, every other time the * key was pressed in either the quick actions menu or on the keyboard, it instead opened a construction menu from that point forward ….the same happened with the f key, it fired my weapon 1 time and then instead on all subsequent inputs opened an entirely different menu of actions only one of which was combat and when pressing the offered combat key in that menu…..it did nothing but close the menu.

4. Movement…if you ever see an enemy, you can no longer move without opening the combat menu and telling the game to ignore it, then you can move about 3 tiles and then you need to impute the command again….it is exceedingly tedious.

5. There is zero sound in this game, absolutely non. Music and sound effect packs exist for this game and non are included.
Show more

Response from developer

All the gameplay issues (2-5) you mentioned are related to the base game itself and had nothing to do with mobile port. The one-time purchase was there in past, and there is no way to delete it from the app store. There is no such option now: only subscription. And yes, I haven't updated the game for a year. Still it's the latest version available in the app store: the other ones are way older. Hopefully I'll updated it sooner or later.

Why a subscription?

This is a great game. And it would be more than worth purchasing for a flat fee. But a $12.99 yearly subscription is just a bit far fetched for me. I also have a UI suggestion. The UI, here, is good, but I always found the CDDA UI in the really old iPhone CDDA app by Blue Bottle, REALLY good. It looked nicer and for me anyway, made the app easier to use. The Blue Bottle UI was really polished and it’s a shame that it lost support all those years ago. It would be cool to see that UI again.
Show more

Just a scam

You can’t play the game without paying $12.99 a year. It’s just a scam. Don’t waste your time. Really a shame since I love this game so much on desktop.

Response from developer

Just go play on desktop: it's really way better on a bigger screen and with keyboard. Those who REALLY want to play it on iOS don't hesitate to pay a single buck a month for it.

Subscription based. AVOID. A

EDIT:The developer does not care about anyone on an iphone 16 suffering from cut off UI, because he just couldn’t get used to the new, barely shifted, UI. Insane. See the reply.

Not a fan of a yearly sub. one time buy maybe.

The UI is shifted compared to the other ports, and game pad on the bottom left is clipping with the phone making the diagonal bottom left very hard to tap.

UPDATE: The developer seems to not really care as the UI is still misaligned. I would avoid.
Show more

Response from developer

EDIT: I'm playing on iPhone 13 max and just double checked on iPhone 16 max — no difference, works as expected: cannot misclick. If there's something specific with iPhone 16, please, let me know the details. Thank you for your review. The gamepad is there to prevent misclicks. Earlier it was positioned not to clip, but that resulted in multitude of rages when I wanted to take a single step, but misclick led the character somewhere else that led to death. Hence this.

Subscription based.

Not a fan of a yearly sub. one time buy maybe.

The UI is shifted compared to the other ports, and game pad on the bottom left is clipping with the phone making the diagonal bottom left very hard to tap.

UPDATE: The developer seems to not really care as the UI is still misaligned. I would avoid.

Response from developer

Thani you for your review. The gamepad is there to prevent misclicks. Earlier it was positioned not to clip, but that resulted in multitude of rages when I wanted to take a single step, but misclick led the character somewhere else that led to death. Hence this.

Menus have stopped working

I can’t start a new game anymore, because the menu panels have disappeared. Please fix this.

Response from developer

Thank you for your review. Please add more details and a screen shot or better screen record at https://apollov.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1 Also have you tried restarting a coupe of times? Sometimes the menu just hang and restart fixes this.

Would buy with more guarantees

BN 0.9.1 is out and supposed to fix a lot of problems. When will you update?

Response from developer

Thank you for your review. Since this app is aimed to provide the latest versions of both games, it is up to core developers to make decisions about balance and bug fixes. This app updates then to the latest stable version, whatever that means. While it would be possible to contain more than one version of each game inside this app, it would also bloat the size of the app and, I believe, positively influence only some very small amount of players. If it would be some config options in-game or config files that would help tune balance, for example, it would be nice, but please address core developers to implement it.

Would buy with more guarantees

I’ve played DDA and BN for years, and I’ve purchased all of this developer’s other Cataclysm releases on iOS. I don’t mind paying a fair yearly fee to keep them going. But the current DDA build is basically unplayable — auto-eat and drink don’t work at all, and doing it manually through iOS menus is painful. BN runs, but vehicle fragility is brutal; even a composite-armored Humvee falls apart after a few zombie hits. I’d gladly pay if there were stable build options or some assurance of ongoing fixes.
Show more

Response from developer

Thank you for your review. Since this app is aimed to provide the latest versions of both games, it is up to core developers to make decisions about balance and bug fixes. This app updates then to the latest stable version, whatever that means. While it would be possible to contain more than one version of each game inside this app, it would also bloat the size of the app and, I believe, positively influence only some very small amount of players. If it would be some config options in-game or config files that would help tune balance, for example, it would be nice, but please address core developers to implement it.

Menu stuck after saving

When saving a game in Bright Nights, after exiting the app and reopening, the main menu seems to get stuck and the overlay buttons don’t work properly anymore

edit to respond to dev: Yes I have already submitted a support ticket on your website.

Response from developer

Please report more details to https://apollov.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1, I'll try to help. Edit: yes, thank you, I see it and marked it as important, but ATM I have very little time. I hope to take a look at this week. Sorry for the delay and thank you for your patience.

completely broken

nothing works, menus pile up, keyboard opens and wont close. thats it. thats all i saw

Response from developer

Everything works, menus don't pile up, keyboard opens and closes as expected. What exact issues are you having? In which of 2 games? What's your device? OS version? Post a support request at https://apollov.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1, attach screen shots or better video records. And I'll try to help.

Good good, BN still needs some attention

Base CDDA is solid, a lot of bugs have been fixed over the years and have no complaints. CBN suffers from the automatic rescale of the screen size again unfortunately so I haven’t been able to really play it at all due to that, hopefully to be fixed in the future.

Top Tier Roguelike

This game is complex and incredible. One of the best roguelikes out there but takes some time to get used to the controls.

The port works quite well once you get used to it, but it could use more regular updates. Assuming the updates are continuing I see no issue with the subscription fee. Also, the page down and page up controls are not set by default so you need to change them to something that works such as 3 and 9. Finally, a sound pack would be nice I was disappointed there were no sound effects.

Thanks for bringing this to iOS!
Show more

Top Tier Roguelike

This game is complex but incredible. One of the best roguelikes out there.

The port could use more regular updates but I’m not complaining because it works and that’s all I could ask for in the end. Also, the page down and page up controls are not set by default so you need to change them to something that works such as 3 and 9. Finally, a sound pack would be nice I was disappointed there were no sound effects.

Thanks for bringing this to iOS!
Show more

Options not saving for graphics / terminal

for whatever reason the game constantly restores terminal size and window settings after
restart.

cant use borderless or fullscreen. cant adjust terminal size to actually be able
to
see more of the information in menus and descriptions

The game is great, which is why I subscribed to have it on iPhone also, but this issue makes it hard to enjoy it properly. Hopefully this can be resolved.

Spent a lot of time making a custom micro keyboard configuration with xkeyboard to play this and then discovered this graphic options issue. Bummer
Show more

Response from developer

Thank you for your review. I'll take a look: I thought this issue was resolved long ago, but appears it’s not.

будут ли обновления?

Здравствуйте, огромный фанат этой игры на ПК, но к сожалению не всегда получается за ним постоянно проводить время, поэтому планирую купить игру на телефон, подскажите пожалуйста, выходят ли обновления обоих форков по мере их обновления официалами, и чем отличается эта версия от версии Cataclysm BN за 1500₽?
Show more

Response from developer

Здравствуйте. Спасибо за отзыв. Обновления выходят, правда, стабильных версий давно не было, поэтому приложение давненько не обновлялось. Эта версия от другой отличается, в первую очередь, тем, что тут 2 игры в одной: и BN, и DDA, а в другой — только BN. Ну и моделью оплаты: тут подписка, там — фикс. PS. Видел ваше обращение в поддержку, но что-то у меня портал поддержки не грузится. Либо санкции, либо одно из двух. Отдельное спасибо, что продублировали в отзыв 😌

Seems Alright So Far

It seems all right, normally I’d complain about the subscription fee, but I think CDDA on a mobile device is niche enough that it’s justifiable, I also appreciate that it is yearly instead of monthly, but it would be nice to have the option of monthly? My biggest gripe so far is that the buy now dialogue box is a bit obnoxious in terms of design, it’s too big and bright.
Update: Tried a bluetooth keyboard with this (logitech k480) and it reads my inputs twice at times, very bummed out about that.
Show more

Seems Alright So Far

It seems all right, normally I’d complain about the subscription fee, but I think CDDA on a mobile device is niche enough that it’s justifiable, I also appreciate that it is yearly instead of monthly, but it would be nice to have the option of monthly? My biggest gripe so far is that the buy now dialogue box is a bit obnoxious in terms of design, it’s too big and bright.
Show more

Best CDDA Port for Apple

While this is without any doubts the best option for playing CDDA on an apple device, there does seem to be an issue on my device with the game consistently crashing while exploring unexplored map areas, hoping that’ll be fixed in the next update.

When it comes to the topic of subscription pricing other users are leaving negative reviews for, I personally don’t mind and believe the price fair despite having bought previous versions of the game from Apollov. The App Store charges prices akin to extortion from smaller publishers for “hosting” their apps on a monthly basis, not to mention that it can be difficult to motivate oneself to maintain said apps when they’re an independent developer.
Show more

Response from developer

Hey, thank your warm words. It means really much to me! As for the crash while exploring... I was experiencing this bug now and then while playing the game both desktop and mobile, and AFAICS it went worse with time. There's nothing I can do about it, because the circumstances of this happening are unknown, besides the fact it just happens time to time, and I'm not deep into the game code enough to suspect any part of it. More frequent auto saves should make life a bit better.

Звука нет

Не качайте звук не работает только звук меню и то табаешься когда

Response from developer

Звука нет, потому что его надо ставить звуковым пакетом отдельно. Например, отсюда: https://github.com/damalsk/damalsksoundpack Также можно дополнительно поставить и графические паки, например.