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.