EGX 09: Dark Void Hands-On
The third-person cover based shooter market, although sounding niche is a crowded place. Sharing the stage with Gears of War, Uncharted and Rainbow 6 and countless others, Airtight Games had to do something revolutionary. In their corny words not mine, “the only way was up”.
Why would you put a corridor in a game about jetpacks?
Dark Void’s gameplay is split quite obviously into two sections: cover based shooting and flight. The cover based shooting is standard stuff with the A button moving you in and out of cover, the system is almost identical to Gears of War. The shooting itself felt a bit weak however, with the robotic enemies soaking up entire clips of ammo before going down. The enemies also seemed to either stick in one bit of cover without moving or charge directly at you. They did track you well if you moved around the environment with your jetpack but their predictable AI patterns need some work.
The cover based shooting also works moving up or down a vertical edge, with you clinging to ledges and leaning over to shoot enemies. It looks great, but in gameplay terms it is confined corridor shooting, even if the corridor look spectacular in scale.
Although pretty, this is effectively a corridor
At this point in my play of Dark Void I was ready to give it up as a depressingly average third person shooter. The jetpack, which I initially though would change the feel of the game entirely had simply moved the game from a vertical to a horizontal plain. I was about to put the controller down when I turned a corner, out of a narrow jungle path and saw a vista that promised Dark Void could do more than corridors. It was a wide open expanse. The ground was a colourful array of jungle, rivers and beaches with imposing alien towers reaching up into the sky and towering over me.
I jumped, and for the next 5 minutes Dark Void was a different game. The graphics that looked grainy and poor in the shooting sections looked great as I whizzed past them in this wide open arena. The jittery on foot animations were replaced by flailing limbs and strained turns that portrayed the immense speed that my jetpack now possessed. I felt like I was strapped to a missile. This feeling of being at the edge of control continued as UFOs showed up to thwart me. The jetpack’s agility mixed with it’s fragility made this one of the most engaging aerial combat scenes I have ever experienced.
In the air is where Dark Void shines.
Dark Void is a game that could end up scoring 80s or 40s depending entirely on the balance between fight and flight. I was disappointed by the game every time I had my boots on the ground, but as soon as I took off it was a different game entirely. Lets hope Airtight pull this one off and gets the winning balance of ground to air combat (10 to 90 please).
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