I played the demo for this game, and let’s just say I was less than impressed. It went from a “possible buy if I find it for 20$” to a “maybe I’ll rent it one day”. The demo, to be totally honest, was terrible. This brought down my hype for the game to zero.

So when I rented it (using GameAccess, a Canadian equivalent to GameFly), my expectations were as low as can be.

So does this surpass expectations, or is the final game just as lame as the demo? Read my review and see! (hint: it’s not a positive review)

Developer: Airtight Games
Publisher: Capcom
Date of Release: January 19th 2010

Platforms: PS3, Xbox 360, PC (PS3 version reviewed)

Genre: Third-Person Shooter
Players: 1
Rated T for Teen

Looks and sounds
Well… if this game came out in the first few months of the Xbox 360, it might have looked only slightly below average. By today’s standards, it’s quite bad. The best parts are when you’re flying, the scenery is quite well done, despite being incredibly repetitive (literally half the flying stages have the same look). And the enemy models generally look quite nice, I think they’re good.  Otherwise… the character models are quite low-quality. The character design is as cliché as it comes (the helmet Will gets some ways through the game just makes things worst… just look at the box art, it’s bad). The enemy animation is a total mess, sometimes with enemies completely skipping complete seconds of animation. I understand enemies coming out of cover, but sometimes they skip from out of cover instantly. The overall animation is not too great either, and frame-rate drops are relatively frequent and noticeable.

Sound-wise… Well, the music is cliché, boring and unmemorable. The voice acting features Nathan Drake…. I mean Nolan North, and he offers an okay performance, not spectacular but not bad. The rest of the voices range from average to bad. My big problem with the sound is that it glitches. During bigger fights with lots of flying enemies and allies and lasers everywhere and such… the sound breaks up almost constantly. Maybe I was just unlucky, but I had 3 full missions with sound breaking up all the time, it was incredibly annoying.

Story
The story is a big mess. It starts in the real world, where you get a jetpack from Nikola Tesla. After fighting alien creatures for a while, you get sucked into The Void(a “world between worlds”). There, you’re found out to be the chosen one to stop the alien’s attack, as told in a prophecy… Nothing is really explained properly, unless you read the journals. There’s a few plot-twists, all of which are easy to predict from the start. And then ending is probably the most anti-climactic ending I’ve ever seen… Not like there was much of a climax to begin with, you just get to the final boss at total random, and there’s no rhyme or reason for the rest of the game before that… It’s like they had a few interesting ideas, and jumbled them together at random. Doesn’t make for a good, or even coherent story.

Gameplay
The game is divided in 2 segments: Flying and Third-Person Shooter.
The game starts you off without a jetpack (after the short and boring opening segment with a jetpack). After a while, you get a weak jetpack that can only hover. And after another while, you get the final jetpack. Through the game, you can power up your weapons, using points you get from killing enemies, or finding them scattered around the world. This will either boost their damage or area of effect. The jetpack’s weapons can also be boosted. Both play styles let you use turrets too, which can be really useful. So on to the 2 different play styles!

Flying
I wonder… did NO ONE play Star Fox 64? After all these years, I feel not many games surpassed, or even came close to having such good flying controls. Dark Void, like most games of the genre, doesn’t get the controls right. The biggest problem is the movement(no, not the fact that it’s inverted, I’m totally fine with that in flying games). It’s incredibly loose, and really not precise. Aiming at enemies or various other targets requires good precision, but that’s never easy when the crosshair always undershoots or overshoots the movement you want it to make. That’s partly due to the fact that, when you move and stop moving the joystick, you still continue moving for a moment. So to actually be able to shoot at anything. you have to aim in the general direction of what you want to aim at, and then carefully adjust your aim until it’s centered. Which is no fun at all when you’re in a fast-paced dogfight with tons of enemies everywhere. I also wonder what’s the point of “rolling” (using the right stick), when it could have other uses then that.

Another problem for me is the “special maneuvers” you can do in the air. I have no problem with boosting and braking, those are well mapped. What I have problems with is barrel rolls and u-turns. To do them, you have to press R3, then move the analog sticks in various directions. The 2 sticks in the same horizontal direction does a barrel roll, and the 2 sticks in opposite vertical directions for a u-turn. I can’t be the only one who find this completely stupid. L2 and R2 are completely useless (you can “lock-on” on enemies with L2, but it’s stupid because it only makes the camera point at the enemy in question, and R2 gives you a freeform camera control, which is useless since you have a radar), which not use those buttons for this?

And another thing that could have been cool but ended up sucking is hijacking enemy vehicles. I mean, there’s some uses, letting you take a bit more damage (not that it matters since you have regenerating health anyways), and it gives you missiles which deal extra damage. The hijacking itself is a really badly done QTE-like sequence where you hold Circle on a metal plat up-front, and you move left and right to avoid getting hit, and then you randomly move the left stick around to kill the enemy. The animation is always the same, and the hijacking isn’t fun to do. But there’s problems here too. While you’re hijacking the ship, you can get shot at and die, or the ship might get blown up by an enemy or ally and kill you in the process. In the end, just shooting with the jetpacks normal guns is a lot safer, less time-consuming, and just as effective as hijacking. Though you can take control of ally ships, that’s not very useful either since you might as well leave them to help you out instead of losing the aircraft when you exit it.

Overall, the flying segments are bad, no ifs or buts about it.

TPS
Imagine any good, or even below average TPS that came out this generation. Now imagine if they removed the fun factor from them. That’s basically Dark Void. I’ll admit that the aiming is leagues beyond that of the flying levels, but it’s not incredible either. And I like that you can cook grenades, and the visual representation showing you how close it is to explode is quite nice. There’s not many weapons, 6 of them in total, and only 3 of them being useful (the basic machine gun, the disintegrator(basically a rocket launcher) and the sniper). The rest aren’t really useful, but they can be upgraded to have a bit more use. Now on to the bad in the TPS segments (AKA most of the game).

Enemies don’t always show reaction when you hit them, which just leaves you wondering if you actually did anything. That coupled with the fact that enemies take a TON of bullets to kill makes killing them annoying. And explain that to me: How can 50 bullets not kill something, but 1 punch can? What kind of sense does that make? The melee attacks are awkward, but they’re pretty much your most useful weapon against small enemy groups. The attacks themselves require being close enough, and pressing the melee button starts up a short 2-3 seconds animation which really breaks up the gameplay. The cover system isn’t too great either. It’s not bad, and I’ve seen worse, but there’s always a lot of you poking out, so you’ll always be getting hit. Using grenades while in cover is suicide, since you’ll never actually throw it outside of cover, it just hits what you’re covering behind and stays where you are, hurting/killing you. And enemies are terrible at taking cover, they’re always really easy to hit behind cover.

Speaking of which, the enemy AI in general is terrible. It happened in multiple occurrences where an enemy, sometimes even more than one, instead of attacking me, or moving to more advantageous positions, just stayed in one spot looking at me, not doing anything. Sometimes they’ll get close to you, when it’s obviously a bad idea since you can kill them in one hit with a melee attack. They don’t really form strategies, or actually display any kind of AI, they just… do stuff at random. Also, I don’t understand why they don’t react when you take out a grenade(can’t they see that glowing thing in your hand that you’re obviously about to throw?), instead just reacting when the grenade bounces next to them.

The most interesting element of the TPS segments is using the jetpack to jump higher, attack from the air and “flank enemies”. It’s actually the funnest thing in the game. Too bad it’s ruined by terrible camera when you’re aiming, making actually using the element effectively isn’t the easiest thing, though you can get used to it relatively easily.

The last thing I can talk about here is the “Vertical Combat”, which the developer was putting so much faith in. Well, to put it simply… it sucks. It’s like a super dumbed-down version of the normal TPS segments of the game. It’s easier, for one. You can literally go through all those sections using only melee attacks. In those segments, you “latch on” to a platform that’s on a wall/cliff, move along that wall, and drop down to lower platforms or boost up to higher ones using the jetpack(just requires pressing on Square to do it). When going down, sometimes you get “latched off” from the platform you were previously latched on to when you go down, which is a bit annoying. No such problem going up. As for the actual “Vertical Combat”, all you actually need to do is go up to each enemy separately, using your melee attack on each of them. It’s very rare that you have to do anything else, and you’ll never die in those segments since they’re so easy. So basically “Vertical Combat” is like the normal TPS segments, except you very rarely have to shoot, and you have less liberty of movement. I’m VERY disappointed by that.

Overall… if you want to play a decent TPS… pick up something else, like Gears of War or Uncharted (or their sequels). This disappoints a lot if you’ve played either of those.

Glitchy game is glitchy
Other than the sound not playing properly, the game has a few gameplay bugs. I already mentioned the crappy AI that occasionally just looks at you, or generally isn’t any good, but there’s more. Those are just 2 bugs I experienced, but I know that if I actually looked for bugs, I would have found more, easily. The first one was in the prison escape mission (I think…). After fighting a group of robots by throwing one grenade at them, I find on the ground a round-shaped item I can pick up, which is a fusion grenade. I pick it up. I look at the grenade counter just to find it’s gone. Ammo crates don’t give me any, weapon lockers don’t give me any, and obviously there’s none on the ground, and the grenade button doesn’t do anything anymore. And killing myself doesn’t correct the bug, only finishing the mission does. The other bug is after I liberate some prisoners. I go in the next room, where an enemy pops out of thin air instead of already being there (but that’s not the bug, the actual bug is a lot worse). There’s a gun on the floor, which I have to pick up and use to progress through the level. After 10 minutes of screwing around, I can’t pick it up, no matter what random things I try. So I kill myself. Only then was I able to pick it up and continue playing.

I don’t mind when there’s glitches in a game. But here there’s no rhyme or reason behind the glitches, they just happen at total random. As I said, there’s probably more to be found, considering how stupid and basic the glitches I got were. This really makes me believe that actually testing the game was not a priority, and it’s the proof of a poorly made product.

Overall
This is the second time Capcom has made this mistake. First with Bionic Commando, now with this one. Instead of making the game themselves, they gave it to an American developer with next to no experience. With Bionic Commando, it was Grin, who barely made anything beforehand(none of which was great), and with Dark Void it’s Airtight games, who has a few members from the team who made “Crimson Skies”, but, as a company, has no experience whatsoever. Both times, the games were bad. While I just want to bash the game, I see this as a good lesson for Capcom: DEVELOP GAMES YOURSELVES!  Or at least give projects to companies that have experience, and that have previously made good games. Giving projects to developers that have no experience is almost a near surefire way for the games to fail (I say “near surefire” because of Arkham Asylum).

Not to say Dark Void is ENTIRELY bad… it has a fun concept… And that’s about it. The controls are very way too loose, the flying stages aren’t fun, the TPS segments pale in comparison to any of the good TPS games this generation, the story isn’t good, the presentation is subpar. There’s basically nothing about the game that’s really well done. It had huge potential, and I’ll admit I was mildly interested in playing it before I played the demo, but it ended up not being a really good game.

At least it did generate something good (haven’t tried it yet, but I’m guessing it’s good from what I’ve heard)… Dark Void Zero, which is stupidly only on DSiWare.

This game shows the reason why I love demos: They prevent me from buying bad games.

Pros and Cons
Pros
- Cool concept
- Only around 5-6 hours to complete, so you don’t have to suffer for really long
- The enemies look pretty cool

Cons
- Glitchy
- Sound breaks up
- Very below average graphics
- Lame gameplay
- Boring story
- Only one boss fight, and it’s terrible
- Really easy despite the controls being less than desirable
- “Vertical combat” is just a very dumbed-down version of the normal TPS segments
- Big monsters and hijacking is just big badly-made QTEs
- No multiplayer, removing any possible replay value

The Save Factor
Hum… The game has a starting price of $60 ($40 on PC). And that’s WAY too high. If you insist on buying it, wait until it’s $10. Or just rent it, whichever is cheaper.

jobocan Console, Games, PC, Review, The Games That Didn't, ps3, xbox 360