Imagine your five favourite ingredients in food. Mix it together with a wand blender. Do you think the result is unbeatable good? Hardly. Dark Void from Capcom is a bit like that, it is a good deal of candy here, but the mix is a bit weird. Shooting and cover system is taken from Gears of War, storytelling and voice acting smells Uncharted, board design is a mix of above and Mass Effect, while the color palette has a light scent of Halo.
Yet it is hard to dislike this game, there is something absurd alluring with Dark Void, too. Something that pushes you further, although the notch in the record is a little too much gameplay wise at the end. Similarity is perhaps not so many, but I get the same feeling of Dark Void as with American McGees Scrapland when I play. There is something slightly mysterious, extraordinary and a little indefinable of both titles.
Dark Void gives you the chills similar to Darth Vader in Star Wars and its enticing enough to keep you on the tenterhooks right till the end, which is why many would put it in their top 10 list of Pkv QQ games.
Usual opening
Initially, however, this is a very standard shooter. Well, the story ensures that it is not quite standard. As the wartime pilot William Gray (played by Nathan Drake-actor Nolan North) rushed to the middle of the Bermuda Triangle along with what appears to be a former fling. It is clear that the early gardens in the world is not at all on this earth, but a parallel universe filled with nasty creatures that want you and all mankind to life. Here comes to all the excess Nikola Tesla, the famous inventor and scientist, this must only be very good!
You run around on the board who will arrange for you to when the coverage before you guys loose on the gether-like (read: Mass Effect) enemies. And is thus a large part of Dark Void quite predictable, it is not difficult to guess when enemies are in their usual waves – just take a look at how many cans and other coverage that is in your immediate vicinity. Coverage The system is very much like what we’ve seen in, for example, Gears of War, right down to the feature where you can fire “blindly” by without putting yourself in danger.
Dead enemies emit technology points, which can be used to upgrade weapons and equipment. A good motivation, but the system is not used often enough, so that it is an important part of the game. What however is important is the moment you get a real jetpack of the dear Tesla. Then is Dark Void taken to a new level, and it is reasonably clear that this is more than a regular shooter.
Alternative spider man
The most innovative in the Dark Void is shooting matches in vertical environments, ie up the mountain slopes and the walls of the gigantic buildings. These are both interesting and confusing at the same time, I can not remember having been quite the same feeling in some other games before. The fighting may take place both up and down, where gravity and the jetpack is your best friends. Enemies can appear in absolutely every direction, and with little time pressure besides it will not take long before the adrenaline starts to pump up to the head.
At the highest level of difficulty is Dark Void relatively difficult, there is no doubt about that. Enemy flora is good, and the bad ones have more tools in wait to stop you. Although they are accurate, they are not particularly smart. The enemy has predictable movement patterns (both on ground and air), which sometimes makes it a little to easy for you to get you further.
Head of combat is also the case, the larger units are dumb as bread – force despite. When dragging the allies, only to forget them. They shoot as blind pacifists, and rolled around like gold fish in a small glass bowl.
The mix of mainstream games, flight and vertical Fighting defines in many ways, Dark Void, together with the slightly unbelievable story. I will not say very much about it, you have to almost experience it yourself, but I can reveal that it was not Hitler who started the Second World War.
Messy and Incoherent
On a general basis, I think storytelling, supported by the sequences, appears to be fairly messy and incoherent. It is not always receive with you why you do what, and then lose the game a little context. However, you can find small journals scattered randomly around the world that make a good job explaining some of the background to what is happening around you – but it’s not like it’s enough.
This, along with a gameplay that eventually repeats itself in regular patterns, is the game drag. When you think it goes towards the end, turn yourself in to thinking “it is not over yet?”. It’s like the last hour of the third Lord of the Rings movie, one should put a dot far in the past. Isolation is more of exciting gameplay elements, but they are used in such a way that the abrasion resistance is well below par – you get just tired.
We have been in on that Dark Void is a mixture of a lot of things, it also applies to the visual. There is no question of any final scream graphics, but it is quite problematic to admire some of the environments in this game. In the air you will get an overview of how enormous some of the boards are, and you get the good feeling in the floor that you are part of something fresh and exciting.
Between sequences is like in Uncharted (though with somewhat weaker direction), perhaps not surprising as we have with exactly the same male actor in the lead role. Color range beyond the game becomes more and more Halo-inspired, where the alien is defined by strong blues. Quite attractive, but interesting to the eye, it is rare.
Dark Void gets a plus point for a clean and good user interface, but are drawn for a camera that can be troublesome in some narrower sections of the game. The figure animation occasionally borders to the completely ridiculous, it seems that you follow disguised Japanese robot rabbits when you have your allies on the battlefield with you. Invisible walls to narrow down your movements are also always a minus, as in this game.
The sound ranges from the ingenious to the somewhat strange. The music is written by Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica), and he succeeded very well in his first game project. There, the story goes wrong, can his music create mood and presence. The music is spectacular, not to topple over to the pompous and ostentatious. Voice actor is largely salah, while sound effects are a little more hairy. They do not completely take into account the surrounding environment, which among other things, results in a strange sound from the shoes of Will. But this is just small things, I know.
Conclusion
Dark Void is not the worst cocktail I’ve tasted, the problem is that you can not wash down to many of them – then the taste would be dull and a little headache could sneak into the head. I was most impressed with the sections where you can use your jetpack to UFO’s, or fight in vertical environments against the whimsical enemies. The ordinary ground-fighting quickly becomes boring, and appearing as a rather pale copy of Gears of War.
The games predictability, both in board design and the impending construction, makes one also becomes bored when the end is approaching. History on it’s side is strange, interesting and messy – you never quite get what this is all about, but you want to look around the next corner. In short, Dark Void is a promising title, which is not able to fulfill completely. Take a quick look at the demo before you decide whether this is for you.
