2010 has just begun, but Dark Void already has clinched the award for Most Ironically Appropriate Title: It is an empty nothing of a game, with few bright spots.
The adventures of a cocky World War II pilot who finds himself sucked into an alternate dimension filled with aliens or something inside the Bermuda Triangle, Dark Void starts with a lot of interesting premises, none of which end up paying off. The levels and graphics are lackluster, and the shooter gameplay – whether on the ground or aloft, courtesy of your Rocketeer-style jetpack – is mundane.
Gameplaywise, Dark Void's claim to originality is that jetpack, which lets the main character take to the skies whenever he likes. On the ground, the game is a cover-based stop-and-pop shooter; in the sky, it's free-flight aerial combat. The promise is that you can switch between these two modes whenever you like. The reality is that while this is entirely true, each level is generally designed only for one of them. Zooming around awkwardly in the air like a big clay pigeon doesn't make any sense in the ground sections, and there's no reason to land when UFOs sweep in and fire from the sky.
The fact that the game's action is almost entirely split into these two separate halves wouldn't be a problem if either were especially interesting. But there's very little to say about Dark Void's combat. You're set upon by waves of metallic aliens and you shoot them with a couple different guns. It feels like firing BB guns at C-3PO's inbred extended family. If you've ever played any third-person shooter or flight-combat sim, you've got the lay of the land. It's as generic as can be.
The one exception is the "vertical cover" sections, in which you fire at enemies above and below you as you leap up (or down) a series of hanging ledges. At first, this produces an interesting vertiginous sensation. In real life, I once hung off a ledge staring up a wall, and that's how I felt the first time I tried Dark Void's vertical combat. Every time after that, the sections just felt like pointless busywork: Always filled with the exact same enemies and utterly devoid of challenge.
Up in the air, it takes a while to get used to what you're supposed to be doing. Apart from the bits in which you hijack enemy aircraft, I didn't really feel like I was engaging enemies – air combat consists mainly of aiming a circle at a bunch of little dots.
Dark Void's graphics are as cookie-cutter as its gameplay. The Void itself is an alternate dimension, so it could be filled with anything, but what it is filled with is mostly brown mountains, purple swamps and dull, featureless alien spacecraft. When the game doesn't look plain-Jane, it looks goofy: Every time you die, you end up flailing in ridiculous, rag-doll fashion, then clipping halfway through the floor.
And then there's a whole pile of little problems:
Dark Void doesn't make much use of Quick Time Events; it only throws them in once you're close to a checkpoint and it wants to kill you. Figuring out by trial and error what the hell the game wants you to do when it shows you a static picture of the left control stick is a pain in the ass, since every wrong solution means you get to do a whole boss fight over again.
The quickest way to dispatch enemies is to use a melee attack, but someone decided it would be good to map that action to the same button as "pick up a discarded weapon" and give the latter priority, such that instead of punching the alien in the face you pick up his gun, then the gun you dropped, then his gun, then the gun you dropped, then his gun, then you die.
Taking off from the ground is easy. Trying to land will generally get you killed if you don't switch to hover mode properly or if you brush up against the edge of something. Again, moments where you need to land are generally placed at the end of a section of the game that you don't want to repeat.
Even though some stages (like the penultimate aerial battle) felt like they lasted forever and ever, Dark Void is a pretty short game with an anticlimactic ending that does little more than set up a sequel.
Listening to the game's music over the credits, I realized that I had enjoyed it throughout the game. When Bear McCreary's (Battlestar Galactica) name scrolled by, I understood why.
In all other respects, Dark Void was an ambitious project that just didn't make it off the ground.
WIRED Cool soundtrack; unique "vertical shooting" concept.
TIRED Mundane graphics; thin plot; gameplay that vacillates between "OK" and "broken."
$60, Capcom
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