Dark Void Demo Impressions
Dark Void has no right sucking, it’s got jetpacks, horizontal cover based shooting, vertical cover based shooting, Nolan North, a Brad Pitt movie adaption and it’s made by Airtight games whose previous effort, Crimson Skies scored high critical acclaim (88 Metacritic) and a large cult following. Dark Void’s premise is very promising and although my last hands on with the title in left something to be desired, I was confident with Airtight’s track record and lengthy development time that the game would turn out for the best. With this week’s demo preluding the game’s final release on the 12th, I took it for a spin to see how far it’s come since October.
Flight owns ground combat in Dark Void
My main comment about Dark Void last I played it was that the flight sections were it’s main strength compared to it’s monotonous ground encounters, Airtight seem to know their strengths too because you start the demo at the top of a cliff, the kind that begs to be jumped off of. Once you leap, engage your jetpack and un-invert the controls after a horrifying and sudden dive into a cliff face the action really starts. In the air is where Dark Void really shines, the lighting breaks through the impressive clouds, the textures that looked murky up close look fine when you’re zipping past them and the fluid animations give off an air (no pun intended) of velocity. Once in the air you are encouraged to get comfortable with the jetpack controls through a quick tutorial. It’s responsive as you would expect from the developers of Crimson Skies and the gesture controls that trigger quick 180 turns and other aerobatics are intuitive and infinitely useful.
You don’t get much time to play around however, before some nasty looking UFOs show up intent on murdering you. Using the agility of your jetpack is key to taking down the UFOs as you need to line up machine gun sweeps to shoot them down, there is a nice balance between your superior agility and their superior firepower but the combat never blows you away. As well as shooting the UFOs I also experimented with the ability to hijack them, this lead me into an easy but incredibly lengthy quick time event sequence that disappointingly breaks the fast paced flow of the battle. Furthermore the hijacking maneuver is incredibly easy to pull off, unbalancing the combat to a glaring degree.
After this aerial fight the game then switches seamlessly to an on foot battle in a tower. I was impressed by the seamless change from flight to cover based combat but at the same time fairly disappointed by the on foot combat itself. The guns fail to feel at all empowering, the sound effects and enemy is dire and the cover mechanic is nonsensical. It is by no means broken but it feels half arsed. After a few minutes of average combat a boss showed up and the demo finished with a spectacular battle pulled one of the cheapest tricks in the book, faded out just before the finale. End of demo.
Ignoring the sour taste that the end of the demo left in my mouth, I’m still not convinced by Dark Void, the concept seems to awesome to screw up but a series of technical flaws (average graphics, poor audio) and poor design choices (control scheme, cover system, quick time events) leave me sceptical about this game. Similarly to my previous hands-on, I am left feeling that if the majority of the game is aerial combat that it will do alright, but if I’m stuck with too much average third person shooting then Dark Void could be one of the early disappointments of the year.
The Dark Void demo is available now on both the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Playstation Store.
The demo is criminally short, the engine and premise of the game have promise but I feel it would do better within a city environment as opposed to a large pool of water and then a series of narrow corridors. The jet pack, which was my main attraction to the game, is sadly not incorporated into most of the combat Making the two elements feel very separate.