Great ideas are often inspired by other good ideas. When you take someone’s design and change it to improve it, its called progress. When you take someone’s idea and use it without changing it, its normally called plagiarism or common theft. There is a certain amount of flattery involved when you use another’s ideas. Use plenty of ideas from others and mash it together and you might even be able to pass the similarities off as coincidence. In the case of Dark Void, the developers surely took a lot of great ideas and tried to pass it off as a wholly new idea. Problem is, when you mix peas and carrots you don’t get parrots. You end up with simply peas and carrots.

Fly on the wall

I can imagine being a fly on the wall when the game was first pitched and designed:

“Imagine the movie Rocketeer! The player has a rocket-pack and can fly and hover throughout the game’s levels. It will be a third person game to allow the player to get attached to the lead character.”
“In that case, let’s bring in a cover system that is all the rage with tactical players. Give it a more strategic feel, kind of similar to Gears of War.”
“I think if we license the Unreal Engine we get a free cover system.”
“Let’s set it in the late 30’s to coincide with the movie’s timeframe.”
“Smart! It’s just long enough ago so people won’t remember what things were really like. We can do what we want!”
“This will allow us to bring in the Nazi’s as well!”
“Everyone loves to hate Nazis!”
“But WW2 has been overdone, so let’s put a more sci-fi twist on the story. How about we bring in the Bermuda Triangle?”
“Yes!”
“And aliens!”
“Excellent!”
“By flying through the Bermuda Triangle the player is transported through a portal to another world where aliens named the Watchers enslaved all humans that have been transported there.”
“We can bring in some random famous people.”
“Nikola Tesla!”
“Who is he?”
“Don’t know, but I loved the Tesla Coils from Red Alert!”
“Done!”
“I have seen some great robot aliens in Mass Effect, I can draw up something similar.”
“But let’s make the aliens trapped there as well!”
“Yeah, their home world has been destroyed and now they want Earth!”
“Nice!”
“But wait a minute! What about a romantic interest?”
“Just slap her on there somewhere, and we are good to go!”
“Does this mean the player gets to save the world?”
“Duh, what else does he do?”
“Right then, what do we call this thing?”
“I have no idea…my brain is a dark void today…”

Even though this is probably a gross exaggeration of the design process, there are times while playing Dark Void that I seriously felt like I have played this before. But I will not mention other games for the rest of this review as it will not really be fair on Dark Void.

Rockets in the sky

The unique idea behind Dark Void is the rocket pack that the player is promised on the cover of the game, but only receives after an hour or so of gameplay. The game starts with a bit of flying to tempt you, then shoots you back into the past and you get to play a pretty standard cover based shooter for a while. The cover based shooter sections of the game actually play really well. The cover would have worked even better if you needed it. Unfortunately the AI is so slow that they never figure out tactics like flanking, or sometimes even shooting. The AI really detracts from the whole shooter part of the game and it turns into easy target practice.

Eventually you happen to come across a rocket pack. It’s not fully built and all you can do is short bursts of hovering. As you move across the levels it is often required to hover across chasms or boost your jumps to reach higher ledges. Then the game takes an interesting turn and turns itself into a vertical shooter. Will Grey, the game’s totally irrelevant lead character, needs to ascend or descend along cliff faces or sides of buildings. Enemies do the same and it literally turns the game on its side. Ledges turn into vertical cover, and this slows the action down quite a bit. It’s a nice touch and breaks the rhythm of the game to prevent it from getting stale.

As your rocket pack is upgraded you learn to hover for longer periods and then turn it into a proper flying machine. This again breaks the rhythm and dynamic of the game, but not by a small margin either. It changes the game from an action shooter into an arcade flight-sim. It’s a bit crude and can get quite disorienting, yet somehow manages to be charming. Again the AI is pretty unintelligent and will often fly into cliffs and explode. To further make things a bit more interesting you can hijack enemy craft and use them to shoot down their own kind. There is only one enemy type ship and one friendly ship you can control.

Where the game shines though is the vertical combat that becomes available with the hovering function of the rocket pack. Playing on different platforms, the player can hop over the enemies and attack from their rear. You can shoot up and land on an outcrop and take care of enemies from afar. Yet it is again let down by AI. The enemies with rocket packs will shoot into the sky and then hover there waiting for you to pick them off, while the ground based troops often seem unaware of the location of the fire they are taking.

Identity crisis

The idea of a cover based shooter and an aerial shooter also forces the game to contradict itself. It’s clumsy to move from behind cover to fly up, or to fly behind cover. A bit more thought could have gone into integrating these two parts of the game.

All throughout the game you also collect a few different guns, but they are nothing more than your standard shooter fare. You get a machine gun, sniper pulse rifle, pulse rocket launcher and so on. Realising the weaponry will not be enough to see the player through the whole campaign, the developers tried to add weapon upgrades and customizing. By shooting enemies you pick up tech points that can be spent upgrading your rifle with more power, or let your pulse rifle cool off quicker. This fails to really make any impact on how the game plays.

UNREAListic amounts of brown

The game is pretty bland though. Brown and brown with a hint of brown. The level layouts are pretty generic and the special effects are not all that special. The Void is a place that clearly has no bright colours, and it could have used a bit of vegetation to spice it up a bit more. Using the Unreal engine has a few drawbacks too, literally. The texture loading is clearly visible and a scene will start off with huge blurry textures. As the textures are loaded they pop into the scene. This has been a problem with Unreal tech on all consoles, yet it has been greatly improved with newer games. Dark Void seems to have taken a step back. Why the developer could not use the hard disk to speed up loading is beyond me.

Audibly it is quite flat as well, with sounds that never quite get the punches right and the explosions sound more like a thud than a boom. The music varies from great orchestral tunes to rather uninspired techno beats. The best song is during the end credits, and is the main theme playing as an 8-bit console song. Great stuff! The game’s cutscenes have a few familiar voices, but the actors deliver an uninspired performance. I can only really blame the lack of real story and dialogue for this. How can you get into character when your character has no story?

The story tries really hard to pull the player in, but never gives itself enough chance. All throughout the levels you pick up journals and letters from people who have been stranded in the Void. This tries to expand on the story somewhat. With a bit more effort in the cutscenes to make the story more coherent, it actually could have turned into a great piece of fiction. As it stands though, it’s simply a gap-filler between shooting stuff. The romantic interest is terribly stuck on and has more than a passing reference to Neo and Trinity in the closing moments of the game.

With the crudest of stories and a mixed bag of gaming concepts, Dark Void tries really hard to impress. It does so with varying degrees of success. Some of the borrowed ideas work well on their own, but not when mixed together. It does not create a whole new genre. Peas and carrots is all you will get. The verticality of some of the shooting levels makes for an interesting dynamic and could have been awesome if the AI allowed it to be of any use other than the “oooh” factor. Dark Void is not a bad game by a long shot. It is also not a great game either. It is very entertaining though, in an average kind of way. If that sounds confusing, then you should probably not play Dark Void. If that sounds intriguing, then give it a bash and you won’t be too disappointed.

The good: Cool vertical fighting…
The bad: …is wasted by stupid AI and bland levels.
The ugly: Texture loading = UGLY!

Purchase: