Dark Void Review

     A review of Dark Void that I recently watched had quite a few negative things to say about the game. I would call it a mediocre to poor review. But all I could think while I was watching it was that the game looked amazing. I love the feeling of disagreeing with a reviewer, of seeing the good in something that others don't like. Sometimes these situations don't pan out, and the reviewer is totally correct. In the case of Dark Void though, my first impression of the game was right. It is awesome. 

     Dark Void is a 3^rd person shooter with some unique elements. The main one is that for the majority of the game you have a fully functional, unlimited-use jet pack and are set looses in massive levels to fight however you want. Amazingly, this angle is pretty fully realized. Many levels are GIGANTIC, requiring you to dogfight your way between key locations. My favorite level has you flying between multiple gigantic flying bases while dog-fighting in a gorgeous waterfall valley. You must raid the bases on foot and then use a combination of on-foot and jetpack movement to navigate massive shafts inside the bases to get to your targets. There are quite a few levels with this kind of great mix of dog-fighting, on-foot combat, and something in between. The fact that you can take off at great speed and fly around freely at any time is great. It's a sense of freedom that I have only felt in a small handful of games. The levels do have limits; flying too far away from the action results in your character turning around automatically. But, within reason, you really can fly up to and walk around on almost anything you can see. This leads to some great moments of exploration and some interesting combat tactics, such as finding sniper nests, or flanking enemy cover by positioning yourself above or behind them.

     The controls for the on-foot sections are the standard cover-based 3PS scheme. The left stick moves you and the right stick aims. Clicking L3 makes you run. The right stick controls where you look. X is jump. Pressing X while in the air lets you boost around at slow speeds with the jetpack for a limited time, after which you will slowly hover back down to earth. Pressing O while hovering cuts the engines. O is melee while you are on your feet (which is extremely powerful, btw. Like, much more powerful than almost every weapon, which is kinda weird). Square snaps you to cover and allows you to do cover-based maneuvers on a contextual basis, such as vaulting over cover or quickly switching over to other nearby cover. Holding L1 makes you take more careful aim, but slows you down to a slow walk. R1 fires your weapon. R2 is manual reload, and L2 makes you throw a grenade wherever you are aiming. I like this grenade throwing system, mainly because it avoids the thing that's present in most shooters where you can throw a grenade with pinpoint accuracy while totally behind cover. In Dark Void you have a lot of control over where the grenade goes, but you have to aim with your normal reticle, so you have to pop out of cover. Pressing any d-pad button will switch you to your other weapon (you can only hold 2 at a time).

     Pressing triangle twice (or once if you are already in the air by jumping or falling) makes you take off with your jetpack. You move at very high speed while flying, so hitting anything is bad and will probably kill you. You may need to work on your take-offs a bit, as I died by crashing into the ground or a nearby object several times immediately after taking off. But after awhile you will be taking off an landing like a pro. You land by pressing X, which snaps you back to hover mode. While flying, you control your movement with the left stick, but the y-axis is now inverted, so you control like a plane (you can change this in the options, but it works well and has a nice feel to it, so I'd encourage you to leave it that way). The right stick controls your rotation, which are far as I can tell is not too useful, but fun to mess around with. Holding triangle makes you fly faster using limited after-burners. While flying, you can't move your reticle around without moving your body, you can only fire straight ahead. R1 fires your twin machine guns. L1 fires your secondary weapon (which is mainly used when you are flying an aircraft, more on that in a second). Holding R2 makes the camera freely movable using the right stick. The d-pad buttons snap the camera to make it look to your left or right or behind you if you hold them down. And holding L2, the most useful of the camera options, makes you look at the nearest enemy without altering your course. Using L2, you can set up some great maneuvers during dog fights with enemy air craft. You might see that they are coming up fast on you and slow yourself down to get them in your reticle. Or you might see that they are above or below you, or to the side, and set yourself up to swing around and get them in your sights. I've had the experience in several games of trying to swing around and get targets in my sights in a 3d space, but oftentimes it doesn't work. In Dark Void, it somehow does work. It just feels right to see where the enemy is and then maneuver them into your sights, making it feel like you are in a real dog fight.

     The controls for barrel rolls and spins and swoops are all controlled by clicking R3 and then moving the analog sticks. Moving them right or left makes you barrel roll, and moving them down or up makes you turn around by either losing or gaining altitude. Moving one up and one down makes you turn around in place in a way only a jet-pack can. All of these maneuvers take up your boost meter, which also drains if you hold triangle to increase your speed. The meter is pretty big and recharges quickly if you stop using it, but if you do run out of boost and try to execute a maneuver, you'll go into an out of control stall.

   Finally, O lets you hijack enemy aircraft if you get close enough to them. You land on them and then resolve a quick-time event that prompts you with button presses. It's quite the spectacle to see you land on an enemey craft, dodge it's guns, force its cockpit open, and wrestle the pilot. If you are successful, you hop into the craft and seemlessly take control of it. These enemy craft (as well as the friendly craft you can land on and take over) control very similarly to the jetpack, but they manuever slightly differently and they have a compliment of high-powered missiles. These missiles have an interesting lock-on mechanic. It seems like if you fire them when an enemy is directly in your reticle (indicated by it turning red), the missile will lock on and follow them. I like this as you don't just automatically lock on, you have to work at it. If the craft gets damaged or you just want to leave, you can jump out by pressing O twice.

     Dark Void's on foot sections are pretty fun. They would be pretty standard if it weren't for the jet-packing you can do to get around the many vertical levels they often have. The enemies are also quite the bullet sponges, which gives the game a nicely different feel than the usual 1 head-shot and you're done play of other shooters. The weapons all also have a nice feel and look to them. There aren't a ton of weapons, but they are all pretty unique. There's an awesome disintegrator that actually disintegrates enemies. There's a cool sniper rifle that always zooms a medium amount when you aim with it and is semi-automatic. This along with its larger than usual clip gives it a different feel than the sniper rifles present in other shooters. These guns also have great upgrades that make them do even more unique stuff, like giving you explosive rounds, or making enemies explode when they die. You get these upgrades by spending points you get for killing enemies. You'll only be able to afford a few upgrades during a game; just enough to upgrade a handful of your favorites. I liked this because when I re-played the game on hard mode, I upgraded the other weapons and had a different experience. There are a few other unique guns as well that do cool stuff. I'll let you see them for yourself.

     There is also this thing called vertical combat where you either jump down to lower platforms or use your jet-pack to rocket between platforms by pressing square when you are lined up, all while taking cover underneath and on top of said platforms as enemies shoot at you. This is really fun as the camera shifts behind you and enemies fall toward you if they are above you or away from you if they are below you. Melee is really cool during these segments as you can throw enemies off of the platforms. Watching enemies fall past you as you shoot them, and watching the inhuman way the robotic enemies flip around the platforms and grip them to get a good angle on you is very entertaining. It's also quite the mind melter to switch between the normal camera and this camera view. It's just another way the jet-pack and the level verticality are fully realized.

     The jet-pack dog-fighting sequences are a lot of fun. It can take some effort to take down enemy fighters, especially if you don't upgrade your jet-pack's weapons. High-jacking a UFO is often a good idea so you can get access to it's missiles. The QTE for high-jacking UFO's is fun and stays fun, but I kind of wish it either was a bit shorter or required a few extra button presses. As it stands, there are certain parts of the QTE where you have to wait for a few seconds, which kind of interrupts the flow of the battle. Still, they are great to look at. Switching between flying your jet-pack, hijacking UFO's, piloting friendly fighters, landing on foot, and having the option to control stationary AA guns in some stages keeps the flying segments fun and interesting.

    The game's visual design is really great. The robotic enemies and their tech are especially impressive. They are sort of like Terminator skeleton robots, but a bit bulkier. They have a great metallic look to them. There are a few organic creatures and enemies that are really well designed as well, including some downright scary lizard-like creatures that spookily slither toward you and some characters with surreal, ever-flowing appendages. The aircraft also look great, from the retro-high-tech look of your allies' planes to the incredible gyroscopic cockpits on the enemy flying saucers. There are a lot of great details and moving parts on all these different characters and items. Very impressive stuff.

    Now for the bad parts. The story is awful. Actually, the story is fine (it's about the Bermuda Triangle, the famous people who have been sucked into it, and the other world that lies below it and the race of beings trying to break through that world to earth). It's the writing and cutscenes that are bad. The story scenes are completely nonsensical, and you leave nearly every one thinking to yourself, “I have no idea what just happened, and I don't care.” Because of the bad writing, the journals you can pick up as collectibles feel like a chore. They are really boring and pointless, so it takes the fun out of collecting them. It's a shame since the basic idea of the story and the character and mechanical design is so inspired. The voice acting isn't half bad either. Fortunately you can get through the game without caring about the story too much, so it doesn't weigh the experience down all that bad.

     There are also a few bad choices in the overall game design. Recharging health makes absolutely no sense, so it really shouldn't be included. It's also kind of hard to know how damaged you are as the screen just blurs a little when your health is low. It plays pretty well with its re-charging health system, but you can waltz through a lot of battles without much overall strategy for the level as you only have to survive to get back to full health before the next conflict. There's also some weird pacing, with a few super-long levels followed by a 5 minute level, things like that. I also noticed that auto-save doesn't really work like the game explains it to you. It tells you that whenever you see a certain symbol on-screen, the game is auto-saving, but it really only saves your progress at certain checkpoints. The game also forces you into new game + mode once you beat it, so in order to play hard mode without my weapons' power already jacked through the roof I had to delete my save game data. The Last of Us and this game really don't get the point of new game +. I want to play hard mode for a challenge, not have it be the same difficulty because I'm starting with uber-guns! Not a big deal though, just delete your save.

     The final bad part is that there is a bad, bad trophy glitch. I've read that many of the game's trophies are glitched and won't pop, but the one I couldn't pop (and many, many others have had problems with it) is the most time consuming trophy that you get for upgrading all of your weapons. It doesn't pop for a lot of people and the only solution the internet offers is to replay the game and farm a lot after deleting your save, a solution which takes about 5 hours. I'm not doing that. No platinum for me. This is a big slap in the face from the developer, especially since I put a lot of work into the platinum only to have the game fail it for me. I'm just hoping that when I get the DLC and the accompanying patch it will magically pop, but I doubt that will happen.

     I know these flaws sound bad, but Dark Void is a really, really fun game. Only a handful of games deliver on the promise of a sense of open freedom. Dark Void's massive levels deliver big time on this concept, maybe more than any game I've ever played. The cherry on top is the great visual design. These two great strengths far outweigh the garbage writing and the other quirky flaws. They push Dark Void up to a Great Game, tier 2.