Dark Void - Quick Review

One of the most anticipated games to come out early this year was Dark Void, developed by Airtight Games and published by Capcom. It was also one of the most dissapointing games that I have played. The game was hyped up by major game critics for the fact that the player would be able to utilize a jet-pack for air-combat, while mixed with on-foot combat. Upon playing I saw that gameplay with the jet-pack was massively under-developed, especially if you are playing on a PC using a keyboard and mouse.

Being a hardcore gamer, playing this game on hard mode while flying was closer to a nightmare. Aiming with the jet-pack mounted duel machine guns was nearly impossible, and I couldn’t shoot a single alien flying saucer during the whole game. Instead I found it easier to shoot them with my assault rifle while hovering (similar to the Black Project in Grand Thaft Auto San Andreas) or while on the ground. So what was the point in creating a jet-pack? Airtight Games should have realized to give the player an enjoyable gameplay experience, not some hard slog where I had to stop myself every five minutes from bashing the monitor with my keyboard. Hyjacking an enemy aircraft was one of the most boring pre-scripted events I have come across a game, which I didn’t even bother to do after a while. Not only that, but resuming the game from a checkpoint in narrow places if the jetpack had been turned on accounted for the most number of deaths I had to face, because the game would have been saved with the jetpack flying in an upper arc or a lower arc most of the time, so if you don’t press the hover key at once, you would crash to death. Those are just a few points of the horrible flying experience a player has to face, for it would take me several pages to explain in full.
Ground combat has been cloned from Gears Of War, with the only thing added been the vertical cover system, which I never found interesting. Can you possibly think a person can hang by horizontal piece of cover with their legs up for minutes at a time? All you have to do is to duck and shoot, similar to popping out and shooting if you are on the ground. So why they even tried it is still a mystery.

There are a number of weapons with the most difficult upgrading system in any game I have played yet. Once you kill an enemy you get XP in the form of glowing orbs, which vanishes if you don’t collect it within seconds. So if you face a stand off against a large number of enemies, you can only collect the orbs of maybe the last couple of enemies. For a game implementing a cover system, this was the silliest thing I found in this game. Why encourage the player to take cover while simultaneously telling the player to collect XP from fallen enemies? That can be only done by taking fire from other enemies. The end result is that I could only upgrade my assault rifle, while there were another half-a-dozen weapons or so remaining.

The next dissapointing thing was the characters. If you are a PS3 player, you will immediately notice that Will Grey is like Nathan Drake’s younger brother, and it is even voiced by the same person (Nolan North). Nikola Tesla (one of my favorite physicists), is just a another face in the game, while I expected him to be some sort of mentor to the player like Leonardo da Vinci in Assassin’s Creed 2.

The plus side to the game is the graphics, which can also seem a little boring if you have played Unreal Engine games before. The lip sync was perfect, because I didn’t see any loss of sychronization, while some players told me they had. The frame rates were amazing on my dual core PC, and the game didn’t crash once during the whole game.

So best of luck playing Dark Void.

Mass Effect 2 - Quick Review For Xbox 360 and PC

Bioware has really come good with their sequel to Mass Effect. Mass Effect 2 is one of the best looking games to have come out this year, which is both technically and graphically superior to its predecessor. Having gone through the game a couple of times, what surprised me was how Bioware managed to come up with something so epic in just over two years, since the original Mass Effect was realeased in November 2007. And it’s not just Mass Effect 2 they were developing for the past couple of years. Last November saw the realease of the critically acclaimed Dragon Age: Origins, which wasn’t a normal game by any standard, so Bioware can be seen as one of the most efficient of developers’ recently. Don’t even get me started on Valve and Half-Life 2: Episode Three!

When I heard last year that Mass Effect 2 was going to be built on the Unreal Engine 3, I have to say that I was a bit dissapointed, since its predecessor was also built using the same engine. But upon playing the game, I could see a massive graphical improvement to other games using Unreal Technology, meaning that Bioware had been giving the engine a thorough graphical update. The shooting mechanics have been improved, such as a superior cover system, regenerating health which is the norm these days, and intelligent squad mates who actually seek cover. I was a bit annoyed with the thermal clips since my assault rifle always seemed to run out of ammo quickly, but the heavy weapon system contained some really cool unique weapons, such as the Collector Beam. Exploring uncharted worlds on the Mako has been replaced by mineral-mining mini-games, which can feel repetitive after scanning a couple dozen worlds, but tracking an anomaly with the scanner provided some excitement though I didn’t come across many. The most impact on the story would be if you continue with an imported Commander Shepard from Mass Effect 1. Just play and experience it, for I have no words!

The most exciting aspect of Mass Effect 2 are the NPCs: in particular, Shepard’s team-mates. Voice acted superbly with an all-star cast, you will be delighted to hear some voices, such as the Illusive Man’s. What really hooked me up was that I actually began to care for my team-mates. ‘SPOILER ALERT’. For example, on the final mission inside the collector base, I was given some choices on which squad member to send through a vent to open a blast door. If you haven’t already played, you must be thinking that it must have been an easy decision to make, but believe me, it’s not. Since Jacob (one of my team-mates) volunteered, I sent him through, but once the blast door was opened and everyone was inside, Jacob ran into trouble closing the door beause he wasn’t a tech-expert, and was eventually killed by a headshot from a Collector. Later I learned that if I had sent in Tali (another team-mate) through the vent, who WAS the tech-expert, this could have been avoided, but I was romantically involved with her so I couldn’t bring myself to do it. (I started a relationship with her because I actually wanted to see what she looked like under her mask!). It’s not just romance. You WILL actually care for other squad mates too. This just shows how careful the decisions you take must be.

‘SPOILER ALERT’. But there was one flaw which I still can’t forget. After recruiting the geth called Legion, I got this great idea. I wanted to go to the Citadel with my geth team mate, because I saw increased security due to geth during one of my earlier visits there. My plan was to shock the inhabitants of the Citadel, but it was me who got shocked. I couldn't believe Bioware forgot this because no one gave a damn about my geth team-mate. I intentionally spoke to the woman at the customs checkpoint in the hope of a dialog regarding Legion, but there was none. Same went for Captain Bailey and Councillor Anderson, (I played an imported Shepard where I made him the Councillor in the first game). Not even a word about a geth walking in the citadel by an inhabitant! You will understand better if you had played Mass Effect 1. But I forgave Bioware easily because the rest of the game is simply superb, and I hope they will not make a similar flaw in their upcoming games.

All in all, this is a game that all you Xbox 360 and PC gamers should definitely get your hands on, if you haven’t already! Hopefully it will come for the Playstation 3 soon. So happy gaming and look out for my next review, most probably going to be for Bioshock 2!