Dark Void: Negatives
The biggest crime done by Dark Void is being less than mediocre. It is so bland that even Wonder Bread is more bombastic in its existence. Now there are plenty of games out there like this, but Dark Void turns it into more than just a matter of state or existence.
It’s a game about flying around on a jet pack! How do you make that boring?!
I had been excited for Dark Void specifically because it looked as if it wanted to be more than a shooter. Unfortunately, a good chunk of the game feels precisely like your average gun-pointing fish-in-a-barrel third person experience. It has decent enough cover mechanics, but it’s like they never understood what made that work so well in Gears of War. In Gears the Locust feel like there’s some form of strategic plan. Some will take one route, others will take another. Overall it feels like a squad working together, and there’s never a moment where someone isn’t laying fire down on you.
Dark Void’s enemies just jump and run around at random. There are no clever A.I. tactics used to try and outsmart you. Every enemy is handled the same, including foes on jetpacks. Just get into cover, wait for them to show their head and shoot. Any gun will do, you just may need to expend more bullets on more heavily armored foes. Just aim towards the head and fire off.
This is the most generic thing your shooter could possibly do. Games like Call of Duty can get away with it because their A.I. is varied enough, the environments are finely crafted and enemies go down in just a couple of shots. You’re not just pumping ammunition into a large number of enemies until finally one goes down. You know that the first two bullets will at least knock them down momentarily, if not for good. It feels as if something is getting accomplished since they go down so fast, while simultaneously providing a thrill since you are nearly as vulnerable.
Yet these mechanics weren’t going to be the main draw of Dark Void anyway. It was supposed to be, once again, flying around on a jet pack. Unfortunately they never thought to take true advantage of that fact when it came to fighting enemies or flying through environments or tackling bosses. Star Fox took more advantage of flight on the Super Nintendo and that was on-rails.
Essentially what you have is the ability to climb up or down ledges, shooting at enemies vertically. This seems nice and all, but the only time gravity really plays out in your favor is when you grab foes and pull them down off the ledge above you. Otherwise it’s the same cover based gameplay as usual, only your movement is more heavily limited. Trying to climb back down or up is also inconvenient, almost as if they never planned on someone wanting to easily backtrack. Your best option is to just drop or stand up in an exposed position hoping to survive.
So for the first several hours of the game you go from generic third-person shooter into a generic third-person shooter with limited movement. Finally you get the jetpack’s full capabilities, but the only thing it is used for is dog-fighting. Not that dog-fighting is bad. It is by far the only part of the game that can be deemed as true fun. However, your foes generally are other ships or giant bosses that remain still while you pass them over shooting at them.
The player has the ability to hijack an enemy plane, but there isn’t much advantage to doing this after upgrading the pack to deal more damage. The process of busting a plane’s cockpit open and wrestling with the pilot is fun enough the first time, but doing it so many consecutive times after just isn’t worth the trouble. Especially since the planes won’t be functional for long.
Dark Void is also the victim of a games studio that has never even heard of usability testing. The icons used for Quick Time Events are not very clear most of the time and give little indication as to what the player really ought to be doing. It interferes with what is technically the first “boss fight†which I have written at length about here.
Even flying around is turned into a frustrating mess due to the controls. Most of the time they work fine, but as soon as you need to land, avoid colliding into something or in some cases take off, you may find yourself flying head first into a solid skull-shattering wall. Landing is something the player can get used to, but it takes some time of flying into the ground or shutting off the jetpack too early, falling to their demise to get the hang off. If you are running forward and activate the jetpack, prepare to immediately fly face-down into the pavement. The designers never considered that you may need a moment to adjust, merely sending Nolan North into the sky while ignoring controls temporarily. It takes some adjustment, but is all very counter-intuitive. The learning curve in any game should be as flat as possible rather than crashing into flat objects as often as possible.
Knowing where you are supposed to go can be a complete mystery at times. Even though a beacon will be there to indicate the general direction of your destination, as you get closer it eventually vanishes. If your objective is hidden behind something then it is very possible you will never get a good look at where you are supposed to land, and therefore must wander about until finally you trigger the next objective. Why a vanishing beacon seemed like a good idea is beyond me, but the developers felt it was a fantastic concept and implemented it without testing it with real live users that didn’t know what they were doing. What a shocker.
There are, of course, glitches to only make the experience that much more frustrating. They seem to appear most frequently when loading a previous checkpoint, such as the screen going black except for the HUD elements and constantly falling. Or perhaps an incredibly loud and annoying electronic ringing in the ears until the next check point is reached. My personal favorite was when the input for fighting the final boss wasn’t working, resulting in my demise halfway through the fight.
Most of these issues didn’t show up until later in the game and were rare enough as to not be annoying, yet when they do show up they interfere with the game in a major way as to hurt the overall experience.
Then there’s the plot, of course, yet in most cases these days that goes without saying. Hell, I’m surprised it’s as interesting as it is, despite how boring and generic. I mean, really, Nolan North is the prophesied one? The only other genre where that cliché has been more overdone is fantasy novels. It is so overdone it has become a burnt lump of coal.
Dark Void is a game that, ultimately, should have been interesting, fun and different. Instead it was a boring mess that was only worth beating for the dog fights. There truly was nothing worthwhile in this game to make anyone want to play it.
Capcom shouldn’t abandon working with Western developers; they just need to choose better studios to make games worth publishing.
