Dark Void (Xbox 360) Reviews
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All That Could Have Been
With every video game, dare I say every form of entertainment, a single feeling tends in retrospect to define the time you've spent with it. Be that feeling excitement or disappointment, humour or heartbreak, fear or fun - the list goes on to encompass every high and low-point along the breadth of human experience - that one takeaway comes in time to signify, like a perfect mnemonic, all the myriad quirks and individual aspects of a thing.
If and when you play Dark Void, the latest effort from Crimson Skies developers Airtight Games, the thing you'll feel most often is that this curious hybrid could have been great. Equal parts shooter and arcade-esque flight sim, in the end, too many cooks rather spoil the Dark Void broth. It tries to innovate in a genre that, if not quite stuck in a rut, has certainly done little more than tick over since Epic Games made cover systems and stop-and-pop gameplay a must in any shooter outside of the Call of Duty monolith with the ubiquitous Gears of War. It means to do this... with a jetpack.
In Dark Void, after a few levels of dreary, uninspired third-person shooter fare, your player character - voiced once again by Nolan bloody North (though as per usual he turns in a naturalist, spontaneous-sounding performance) - meets Nikola Tesla, who instructs you on the fine art of aerial combat. Shortly thereafter, things take a turn for the better; you strap on your jetpack and take to the skies, where the fun lives.
Airtight Games do a fine job of making the transition between flying and shooting seem as natural as a good cheese sandwich with some nifty perspective trickery and a selection of energetic, impactful animations, and from the moment you spread your wings, it's plain to see where the developers' real strengths lie. The strange world of Dark Void - previously composed of janky in-game assets, stuttering audio, muddy textures, invisible walls and monotonous enemies which look like they've been carelessly repurposed from the Mass Effect art department's shredder - finally opens up.
At last, you can create your own entertainment out of the curious patchwork of experiences Dark Void has to offer. Shooting for the sun and freefalling to the ground from thousands of feet up only to ignite your jetpack thrusters at the last possible second and soar across the lowest point of a valley, sending up spray from the river blurring beneath you.
These are far and away the most memorable moments of Dark Void, and kudos to the developer for allowing them at all. But such sequences are never incentivised; too many players will plough through the eight-hour single player campaign without straying so far from the beaten path. Still more damningly, one short-sighted restriction or another keeps you from such gleeful exuberance for the majority of the experience, be it an invisible wall, a dead zone or a mass of textures that serve no greater purpose than to say ye shall not pass.
Mostly, though, you're stuck on terra firma, where the action amounts to a hollow barrage of budget shooter scenarios that feel forced and artificial. Neither is there much to the so-called 'vertical combat' which the publicity would have it was to distinguish Airtight Games' latest; hanging off perilous abutments and peering into bottomless chasms while wielding a weaponised Tesla coil should be utterly exhilarating, but it wears out its welcome quickly - it's just the same old moment-to-moment from a different perspective.
Dark Void should have followed the advice of its own scattershot story, which has carbon-copy clones of Drake and Elena from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves stranded in an in-between world where elements of humanity strive against the odds for freedom from their alien oppressors. Ironic, perhaps, that a game which has the boundless freedom of flight as both its primary narrative drive and the highlight of its otherwise insipid moment-to-moment gameplay instead feels claustrophobic in light of its many limitations - and I don't just mean in technical terms. Dark Void is all about what could have been; what is, isn't all that.This review comes from another site
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Fatally flawed
Bugs and a lack of polish turn this - occasionally high-flying - shooter into a generally dispiriting experience. I have a taste for mediocre games (I quite enjoyed the recent Wolfenstein, f'rinstance), but most people prefer their games to be good; those people should give this game a wide berth.This review comes from another site
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Seriously?
I was so disappointed with this game. It honestly feels like Capcon couldn't be bothered with it. The story for one is rubbish. It's set in pre-WWII, and the main character's a cargo pilot who happens to fly over the Bermuda-Triangle and crashes into this strange land (The Void) but, only after about an hour of killing waves of ROBOTS with LASERS does he actually go "....err, hang on, where am I??..." and "who are these robot fellas?" The main guy is also this wooden typical "chiselled-jaw, super hero yank" Also all of the character talking and interacting is done "in mission" i.e. instead of explaining stuff during a cut-scene, people try to talk to you while you're being shot at. Also the missions move at light-speed. It's honestly:
Crash in Void
Meet some tribal people
THREE words are said
Going searching for broken planes...err...why??
The graphics are really, really poor. Even on a HD bells and whistles TV it looks poor. The combat is just cover-shoot-cover-shoot. With (as one other reviewer said) super-hard to kill baddies and identical enemies. The enemies don't even take the impact of the bullets. The air combat is very fiddly too. The sounds are your generic action loud-noise-type. Also, it's so bloody short. I was thinking that maybe the game's is so generic `cos it has along life...nope.
And, for my personal gripe. For some reason the "machine-gun" (it's a rifle, Capcon) has no shoulder-stock. You cannot aim and fire a rifle without a shoulder-stock. Anyone who disagrees hasn't used or fired one. And, you cannot fit 80 cartridges into a standard sized magazine...another magical "upgrade" I don't care that it's not a "real" game. You wouldn't accept 13 players in a football team in Fifa, would you?
This review comes from another site
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GREAT GAME BUT TOO SHORT
IT IS A GREAT GAME BUT FAR TOO SHORT. COMPLETED IT IN ONLY 2 HRS 37 MINS.This review comes from another site
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Sadly a big disappointment
Capcom made sure everyone knew the team behind the excellent Xbox 1 title Crimson Skies was behind Dark Void, but if you are a fan of that game (as I was) then get ready for disappointmet when you play Dark Void. The game is essentially split into two parts, one is a weak Gears of War clone, and the other is a less fun and very shallow version of Crimson Skies.
The former really is weak, with identikit enemies taking way too many shots to kill, ugly environments, and very repetetive gameplay. The latter is sadly a disappointment too, and basically revolves around following your target crosshair to kill wave after wave of, again, identikit enemies.
The game rarely looks anything other then poor right across the board, and the voice acting (Nolan North, YET again) also feels far too familiar and predictable.
As Amazon are virtually giving this away now you may be tempted to pick it up, but my advice would be to give it a miss. With so many top tier games on both platforms out over the coming months I'd just wait for those instead.This review comes from another site
