Dark Void

Review from Cav - Thursday, 04 February 2010 @ 12:50pm

So.... what do you get when Iron Man, Jango Fett, Nathan Drake and the Rocketeer all jack off into the same cup at the sperm bank? Well, once that ‘donation’ had been picked up, about nine months later you’d get Dark Void.

All jokes aside, Dark Void really reminds me of Star Wars: Bounty Hunter.... which I am currently looking for on the GameCube, if you can help a brother out. The lead character (voiced by flavour of the month, Mr Nolan North) is your typical hero and ladies man that has littered many a game over the last couple of years, although this time he gets to wear a jetpack. When are we going to get a Napoleon Dynamite type character to come along and save the world, riding a Liger and being followed by a blessing of Unicorns? Anyway, once you throw in the Bermuda Triangle, Nikolas Tesla (the likeness is pretty damn good) and some bad guys and bosses who looked like they came from the cutting room floor of the latest Metal Gear Solid game, you get what could have been a really in-depth story, but I found it all a little too choppy and way too short.

I lost my shirt in a tragic jetpack fire

The action is pretty much 50/50 between the ground and the air. Fly around and shoot things or run around and shoot things and.... well that’s about it. Sorry, please forgive me, I stand corrected. You also get to smash computer consoles with the butt of your weapon, and rip circuitry from panels. Oh and the occasional quick-time event in boss fights, how could I have forgotten?

This hurts. No, not the trying to remember what has to happen in the game, but more the fact that that’s ALL that there is!

I half expected there to be the odd puzzle to solve during the process of this game, but was I very disappointed. Puzzles were definitely needed to put some challenge into this game. Gimme a lock sequence, boxes to shift, codes to enter…. SOMETHING!

So.. um... where are the brakes on this thing?

On the ground, the controls for Dark Void are quite simple. General FPS/3PS controls. Airtight have introduced an interesting type of cover system. The game has you involved in quite a bit of vertical scaling, jumping upward, from ledge to ledge with the assistance of your jetpack. You can, of course, also drop drown a level. Your robot enemies can also do the same, so you now have the ability to use the ledge you are on as cover and let some blind-fire go at your enemy. Coming out of vertical cover often leaves you disorientated, struggling to regain the camera centre, but is does give the game a little something different.

Once you get in the air, flying gets a bit harder. I would be comfortable in saying that even seasoned flight sim players would be faced with a slight learning curve. After you have things under control (or as well as you can) tearing through the skies can actually be quite fun, but eventually it all gets a bit long in the tooth. Dog fights can lead to quick-time events, as long as you have a better reaction time than a certain 35 year old who played pretty hard in his younger days and isn’t as quick as he used to be. I think that this would have worked well on the Wii, just like the way Resident Evil 4 played.

The AI in Dark Void seems to be a slight advance on most games I have played of late, for the minor enemies anyway. They like to use the cover, just as much as the player should. When using the vertical cover, this is where the AI can become slightly unpredictable, darting between levels of cover.

Damn it! Stand still so I can kill you!

One thing about the game that I will give huge props to is the musical score. I was quite taken by the music produced by fake Battlestar Galactica composer Bear McCready. Yes I said fake! I am a kid of the 80’s and no one was better at the helm of the Galactica than Lorne Greene.

What? What was that you said? ‘Who the hell is Lorne Green?’

Yeah... that’s what I thought you said.

The music does exactly what it is meant to do, setting a great tone for the game play. You’ll even get a nice blast of 8-Bit music if you are patient enough to sit through the end credits, which is a tribute to the Nintendo DSi Ware Dark Void Zero game.

Pros

Good sountrack and voice acting - Nice balance of ground and air combat - Vertical cover for something different -

Cons

A tad boring and uneventful - No multiplayer - Promising start... disappointing finish - Lack of challenging puzzles -