Game Reviews

For a few fleeting minutes, Dark Void makes a fantastic impression. It throws you right into an airborne skirmish between pre-jet engine airplanes, classically round UFO saucers, and a dude in a jetpack. Guiding a nimble fellow between competing aircraft/UFOs, while peppering foes with machine gun fire and pulling off aerobatics like the Immelman Turn, feels positively exhilarating. But all that shouldn't come as much of a surprise, considering Dark Void's development team is pretty much the same one that created Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge a few years back.

Then this prologue ends, and like the unfortunate fellow in the prologue, the overall game takes a significant plunge downward that it barely manages to recover from. It morphs from a refreshingly original (albeit with a bit of the obvious The Rocketeer influence) flier into a bland, cover-based third-person shooter. The story setup follows the, "give the player the full experience, then change circumstances and make the player re-earn the cool stuff from the beginning" formula; after playing the anonymous jetpack jockey, the game then puts you in Will Grey's perspective. Will is a snarky, fast-talking pilot (voiced by Nolan "Can't Say No" North) who flies through the Bermuda Triangle in 1938 and arrives at the alien/jetpack/butte-filled parallel world called, well, "the Void." Will's eight-hour journey through the Void starts with a mostly generic/occasionally painful sequence where he jetpacklessly jaunts around the mysterious jungle, all while shooting aliens and cracking wise.

Even when Will eventually gets past this humdrum sequence of rudimentary platforming and shooting-at-dumb-A.I.-from-behind-rocks, and finally gets a jetpack, the core gunplay remains problematic and hinders the overall experience. I don't mind how the interface mostly apes Gears of War -- what I do mind is how aiming feels borderline terrible at times. Early on, I thought that Dark Void's framerate was just horrible at staying consistent, as the combat was repeatedly punctuated by distinct moments of choppiness.