It's incredibly mid
Decided to try this one since it was going out of circulation, and it's a solid one. You can see the rough edges of a AA production circa 2010, but the flying is pleasingly evocative of Crimson Skies and the Bear McCreary soundtrack is sublime. Some, well, a lot of the writing doesn't really pass muster (for one, why are they so vague about the actual time period the game takes place in?) but I had a good time regardless.
played the demo back on PS3 and had my fill of this with it at the time but at some point i think i grabbed this through the BC program on Xbox for really cheap. kinda wish i just left it be lmao.
interesting but finicky jetpack mechanics are really all the game has going for it. the intro starts you off with being able to fly around at will while tackling some combat and it's passable enough for 15 minutes (as it was in the demo) but then the rest of the game happens. enemies are way too spongy and the mid-air combat takes a turn for the worst when the other flying ships and enemies put strain on the wonky flight controls.
also wasn't into the story but that was a given at this point. didn't realize this was going to be a time travel type thing or that it was going to have Nolan North showing up to do the most blatant/annoying case of Nolan Northing that i've ever seen so it had that going for it too.
will try the metroidvania side game someday.
interesting but finicky jetpack mechanics are really all the game has going for it. the intro starts you off with being able to fly around at will while tackling some combat and it's passable enough for 15 minutes (as it was in the demo) but then the rest of the game happens. enemies are way too spongy and the mid-air combat takes a turn for the worst when the other flying ships and enemies put strain on the wonky flight controls.
also wasn't into the story but that was a given at this point. didn't realize this was going to be a time travel type thing or that it was going to have Nolan North showing up to do the most blatant/annoying case of Nolan Northing that i've ever seen so it had that going for it too.
will try the metroidvania side game someday.
I'm SHOCKED at how much I liked this. I miss this kind of game so much.
Horrivel a gameplay desse jogo. Inimigos repetitivos e fases sem inspiração.
Anyone that calls a game mid should be forced to sit down and play this, and learn what mid ACTUALLY is.
E um jogo que tem uma história chata e entendiante e sem nexo porém, com um gameplay legal e bem fluído, um jogo de 2010 bem portado no pc, vale a pena numa promoção bem baratinho
Precisava bastante de um gameplay melhor e menos repetitivo e de uma história mais cativante. Só que fato é que isto é o mais perto que chegaremos de um jogo de Rocketeer e eu respeito ele por isso.
No recuerdo una mierda, taba guapo el jetpack tho
This review contains spoilers
Recently delisted, Dark Void may be a hidden gem to some in an industry that increasingly loses access to its history like the games industry. Personally, I feel like this game reflects a lot of the ugliest trends in the industry circa 2010. Does this mean it should have been delisted or does not deserve to be played? Absolutely not, in fact its a huge shame that games like this may be increasingly inaccessible in the future. With that preamble out of the way, lets talk about the game.
Dark Void is truly an enigma of a game. I will try to give an extremely butchered plot synopsis here for the curious. It opens with a shot of a brown skyline where a character flies via jetpack while fighting some sort of alien UFOs. The date, 1939. We watch our jetpacked player character fly acrobatically until he crash lands and is killed by some kind of scorpion robot. Cut to earth where we see someone who I assume is the same player character meeting lead characters Will and Ava. These three load up a plane and fly out to somewhere (I saw this a week ago and somehow these plot points escape me). Long story short, Will and crew crash land in the Bermuda Triangle and find themselves stranded on a jungle island. The unnamed player character from the intro is presumably killed offscreen or something because he straight up disappears as we step into the shoes of Will and begin our adventure for real. Will and Ava reunite and navigate this mysterious forest filled with some kind of blue robot guys later called the Watchers. We engage in terrible knockoff Gears of War cover shooting with these robots until Will and Ava stumble into some kind of Aztec civilization that seems to worship these robots. They tell our protagonist to shove off but Will and Ava are swiftly pulled into a lab by my boy Tavi. Turns out Nikolai Tesla, the real person is living in this Aztec temple developing some means to either leave or based on future events enter the mysterious area known as "The Void" (how spooky). Will and Ava scavenge for airplane parts to go home but after a series of events that I can't or maybe don't care to recall Ava is kidnapped by the Watchers after some sort of argument with Will about how he didn't do enough to stop World War 2 or something like that? I'm not sure, the game treats its historical setting with an insane lack of care or seriousness as the conflict and participants of World War 2 are erased from the story. Instead, Will and Ava talk vaguely about "the fascists" and how they are causing all kinds of ruckus in Europe. I chalk it up to narrative cowardice but dear reader I leave you to decide why the writers of this game decided that their game should be set in World War 2 while also taking nothing from that setting beyond vague references to fascism.
Continuing on, Will gains a jetpack and the bulk of the game begins its core loop between cover shooting and flight combat reminiscent of any plane or jet combat game ever but this time with jetpack and the worst hijacking mechanic of all time with animations that last upwards of 35 seconds to perform. You also do a ton of escorting and defending people or objects in this game which is just bottom of the barrel content in most games not named Resident Evil 4.
After the jetpack is given to the player to test out Will follows the now kidnapped Ava into "The Void." Will and the player move from the dark green and grey forests of the early 2010s to a truly terrifying setting, orange and brown rocks floating over an abyss. I can not overstate how incredibly boring the scenery is in this game. Its incredibly bland and even saying that here I know somewhere in the future I'll kick myself for not emphasizing just how bland this setting was even further.
Will meets Atem and links up with the Survivors. This is a group of refugees in "The Void" looking to...escape? I'm actually not super sure tbh, anything to do with the survivors is just incredibly confusing and not at all told to the player through the cutscenes that all just feel like they exist because that's what video games have. They all felt pointless and very few of them explained what the hell was going on in the game.
After lots of meandering and nothing going on kind of like this review, Will and Ava reunite alongside third wheel Nikolai Tesla who apparently has been helping build a big ship called the Ark. I despise the Ark because every mission involving it was a tedious escort that either felt incredibly buggy or incredibly broken on hardcore. I completed one defense mission for the Ark moments away from its destruction because Will was tasked to single-handedly fight 3 mech scorpions that somehow simultaneously shred Will into pieces and shred the Ark. The Watchers' technology is truly frightening.
At some point, Will is told that he is an Adept by Atem who I think I mentioned once before which probably says something about how memorable the cast is in this game. An Adept is basically someone who fights real good and I guess can jump like 6 feet into the air because apparently they're supposed to have special powers but I never got the sense anything Will did was because of powers considering the overwhelming reliance on a super jetpack designed by Nikolai Tesla (I think I forgot to mention he made that) and guns scavenged from robot aliens. Even Atem, one of our other known Adepts in the game is shown to just sort of shoot a robot real good and do some sort of CQC thing as his big feat to show how special he is.
It all starts to blend together here but eventually Will and the crew of the Ark are taken to some kind of prison labor camp in a scene very reminiscent of that moment in Half Life 2 where Gordon enters a pod in the Citadel and you get to see it from the inside except in that game there were things to look at that didn't make my eyes glaze over with all the grey and blue alien architecture. Will is swiftly saved by Atem who apparently planned to get caught to begin the revolution or something? Its also revealed that this prison camp (which probably gives it too much credit tbh) and the Watchers as a whole are supporting "the fascists" on earth with the war effort. So in this alien facility where every enemy shoots lasers and stuff I guess they're also building like Nazi planes and stuff? I feel like making this game connect to World War 2 was incredibly contrived, hilarious in hindsight, but contrived. Will and crew break out and then he fights a big robot dragon for some reason. After the dragon fight where Will sacrifices his super jetpack to kill it, Ava embraces him only for the true villain some alien disguised as Tavi (or maybe it was Tavi the whole time?) throws a knife at Ava stabbing her in the back in one of the most awkwardly shot cutscenes I've ever seen. Seriously, go watch this thing if you can its incredible.
To conclude this nightmare, I do think Dark Void deserves some praise for being a pretty ambitious game that transitions seamlessly between flight combat and third person shooter gameplay that was pretty standard at the time. It feels like an amalgamation of industry trends at the time though which really hinders my ability to mark it as something truly special. From casting Nolan North as our leading man to evoke the charm of Nathan Drake in a character with so little charisma to shoehorning a strange plotline about World War 2 into a game that totally would have been fine without it this game just does not feel like it forms a coherent identity of its own. It truly needed to strike out its own lane in my view if Capcom or Airtight wanted this title to be a hit. Unfortunately that didn't take and we live in the reality where this game will likely be forgotten and ignored because its no longer a stocked product on digital storefronts and finding physical media from the 360/PS3 generation is an increasingly difficult task.
Dark Void is truly an enigma of a game. I will try to give an extremely butchered plot synopsis here for the curious. It opens with a shot of a brown skyline where a character flies via jetpack while fighting some sort of alien UFOs. The date, 1939. We watch our jetpacked player character fly acrobatically until he crash lands and is killed by some kind of scorpion robot. Cut to earth where we see someone who I assume is the same player character meeting lead characters Will and Ava. These three load up a plane and fly out to somewhere (I saw this a week ago and somehow these plot points escape me). Long story short, Will and crew crash land in the Bermuda Triangle and find themselves stranded on a jungle island. The unnamed player character from the intro is presumably killed offscreen or something because he straight up disappears as we step into the shoes of Will and begin our adventure for real. Will and Ava reunite and navigate this mysterious forest filled with some kind of blue robot guys later called the Watchers. We engage in terrible knockoff Gears of War cover shooting with these robots until Will and Ava stumble into some kind of Aztec civilization that seems to worship these robots. They tell our protagonist to shove off but Will and Ava are swiftly pulled into a lab by my boy Tavi. Turns out Nikolai Tesla, the real person is living in this Aztec temple developing some means to either leave or based on future events enter the mysterious area known as "The Void" (how spooky). Will and Ava scavenge for airplane parts to go home but after a series of events that I can't or maybe don't care to recall Ava is kidnapped by the Watchers after some sort of argument with Will about how he didn't do enough to stop World War 2 or something like that? I'm not sure, the game treats its historical setting with an insane lack of care or seriousness as the conflict and participants of World War 2 are erased from the story. Instead, Will and Ava talk vaguely about "the fascists" and how they are causing all kinds of ruckus in Europe. I chalk it up to narrative cowardice but dear reader I leave you to decide why the writers of this game decided that their game should be set in World War 2 while also taking nothing from that setting beyond vague references to fascism.
Continuing on, Will gains a jetpack and the bulk of the game begins its core loop between cover shooting and flight combat reminiscent of any plane or jet combat game ever but this time with jetpack and the worst hijacking mechanic of all time with animations that last upwards of 35 seconds to perform. You also do a ton of escorting and defending people or objects in this game which is just bottom of the barrel content in most games not named Resident Evil 4.
After the jetpack is given to the player to test out Will follows the now kidnapped Ava into "The Void." Will and the player move from the dark green and grey forests of the early 2010s to a truly terrifying setting, orange and brown rocks floating over an abyss. I can not overstate how incredibly boring the scenery is in this game. Its incredibly bland and even saying that here I know somewhere in the future I'll kick myself for not emphasizing just how bland this setting was even further.
Will meets Atem and links up with the Survivors. This is a group of refugees in "The Void" looking to...escape? I'm actually not super sure tbh, anything to do with the survivors is just incredibly confusing and not at all told to the player through the cutscenes that all just feel like they exist because that's what video games have. They all felt pointless and very few of them explained what the hell was going on in the game.
After lots of meandering and nothing going on kind of like this review, Will and Ava reunite alongside third wheel Nikolai Tesla who apparently has been helping build a big ship called the Ark. I despise the Ark because every mission involving it was a tedious escort that either felt incredibly buggy or incredibly broken on hardcore. I completed one defense mission for the Ark moments away from its destruction because Will was tasked to single-handedly fight 3 mech scorpions that somehow simultaneously shred Will into pieces and shred the Ark. The Watchers' technology is truly frightening.
At some point, Will is told that he is an Adept by Atem who I think I mentioned once before which probably says something about how memorable the cast is in this game. An Adept is basically someone who fights real good and I guess can jump like 6 feet into the air because apparently they're supposed to have special powers but I never got the sense anything Will did was because of powers considering the overwhelming reliance on a super jetpack designed by Nikolai Tesla (I think I forgot to mention he made that) and guns scavenged from robot aliens. Even Atem, one of our other known Adepts in the game is shown to just sort of shoot a robot real good and do some sort of CQC thing as his big feat to show how special he is.
It all starts to blend together here but eventually Will and the crew of the Ark are taken to some kind of prison labor camp in a scene very reminiscent of that moment in Half Life 2 where Gordon enters a pod in the Citadel and you get to see it from the inside except in that game there were things to look at that didn't make my eyes glaze over with all the grey and blue alien architecture. Will is swiftly saved by Atem who apparently planned to get caught to begin the revolution or something? Its also revealed that this prison camp (which probably gives it too much credit tbh) and the Watchers as a whole are supporting "the fascists" on earth with the war effort. So in this alien facility where every enemy shoots lasers and stuff I guess they're also building like Nazi planes and stuff? I feel like making this game connect to World War 2 was incredibly contrived, hilarious in hindsight, but contrived. Will and crew break out and then he fights a big robot dragon for some reason. After the dragon fight where Will sacrifices his super jetpack to kill it, Ava embraces him only for the true villain some alien disguised as Tavi (or maybe it was Tavi the whole time?) throws a knife at Ava stabbing her in the back in one of the most awkwardly shot cutscenes I've ever seen. Seriously, go watch this thing if you can its incredible.
To conclude this nightmare, I do think Dark Void deserves some praise for being a pretty ambitious game that transitions seamlessly between flight combat and third person shooter gameplay that was pretty standard at the time. It feels like an amalgamation of industry trends at the time though which really hinders my ability to mark it as something truly special. From casting Nolan North as our leading man to evoke the charm of Nathan Drake in a character with so little charisma to shoehorning a strange plotline about World War 2 into a game that totally would have been fine without it this game just does not feel like it forms a coherent identity of its own. It truly needed to strike out its own lane in my view if Capcom or Airtight wanted this title to be a hit. Unfortunately that didn't take and we live in the reality where this game will likely be forgotten and ignored because its no longer a stocked product on digital storefronts and finding physical media from the 360/PS3 generation is an increasingly difficult task.
Full disclosure: couldn't play through the game because of constant crashes. Will probably give it another try sometime in the future. Still, I felt justified in rating it based on my limited experience.
I quickly realized I didn't like the story and began skipping the cutscenes, so I figured I might as well download a save file and jump through most of the missions to avoid the crashes.
Shortly before the game's release I played the demo of it and was so impressed that I couldn't wait for the full game to come out. But I remember when I finally gave it a try, the early sections of the game got me so bored that I just kinda moved onto other games.
And it is true that the beginning of the game is kinda slow. You start off with a quick jetpack tutorial and a dogfight, which is pretty fun, but then it kinda drags you into this very slow and mediocre cover-based shooter with a lot of cutscenes, dialogues and walking sections.
Once they give you the jetpack again, there's strangely another dogfight tutorial that is exactly the same. But you also get to do some cover-based shooting with the jetpack, and I gotta say, this is kinda where the game's potential lies, and what impressed me so much with the demo. Imagine a cover-based shooter where you can fly over enemies and ambush them from behind or attack from the air. In addition there is vertical cover that totally shifts the plane of combat. The possibilities here were insane: fully three-dimensional combat and fully three-dimensional exploration of open levels. That's what it could've been.
In reality though, I feel like the systems don't really interact with each other, and often undermine each other. The levels are pretty linear and often wouldn't let you switch between hovering and boosting because you'd immediately start hitting walls and lose control. The floors and ceilings are also quite noticeable. In more open locations you'd see mountains and wanna climb on top of them, but the game just wouldn't let you. But when the game does give you some open-space combat arenas, you quickly realize that you kinda have to get close to your enemies in order to deal any decent damage, and once you do get close, you kinda have to take cover because you're extremely fragile. Not to mention there are very few locations that give you vertical cover.
In fact, I feel like this game is too short and spends way too much time locking you in linear sections and depriving you of the jetpack, the main attraction of the game. Without it, this is just a poor man's Gears of War.
But the dogfights are really the star of the show here. It's very fun to do maneuvers and outsmart enemies. On top of that, the coolest feature is how you can hijack an enemy aircraft and fully utilize it throughout the battle. Like it's not just a gimmick, they don't break in 5 seconds or limit your movement, they're a decent combat option.
Honestly, instead of crafting a story-driven campaign, they should've just given us procedurally-generated open levels with both ground and air combat happening simultaneously like in Battlefront and Battlefield games, except give us better weapons, higher accuracy, more melee options and maybe some special powers to make us feel like a superhero. Let us dive from the air to the ground with an AOE attack or pluck enemies from the ground like an eagle. Let us kamikaze-attack airships or use a hook to zip towards them. Now that would've been a really fun game. But instead this kinda makes you feel like a dog on a leash in a park. There seems to be so much fun to be had here, but they just don't let you do any of it.
I quickly realized I didn't like the story and began skipping the cutscenes, so I figured I might as well download a save file and jump through most of the missions to avoid the crashes.
Shortly before the game's release I played the demo of it and was so impressed that I couldn't wait for the full game to come out. But I remember when I finally gave it a try, the early sections of the game got me so bored that I just kinda moved onto other games.
And it is true that the beginning of the game is kinda slow. You start off with a quick jetpack tutorial and a dogfight, which is pretty fun, but then it kinda drags you into this very slow and mediocre cover-based shooter with a lot of cutscenes, dialogues and walking sections.
Once they give you the jetpack again, there's strangely another dogfight tutorial that is exactly the same. But you also get to do some cover-based shooting with the jetpack, and I gotta say, this is kinda where the game's potential lies, and what impressed me so much with the demo. Imagine a cover-based shooter where you can fly over enemies and ambush them from behind or attack from the air. In addition there is vertical cover that totally shifts the plane of combat. The possibilities here were insane: fully three-dimensional combat and fully three-dimensional exploration of open levels. That's what it could've been.
In reality though, I feel like the systems don't really interact with each other, and often undermine each other. The levels are pretty linear and often wouldn't let you switch between hovering and boosting because you'd immediately start hitting walls and lose control. The floors and ceilings are also quite noticeable. In more open locations you'd see mountains and wanna climb on top of them, but the game just wouldn't let you. But when the game does give you some open-space combat arenas, you quickly realize that you kinda have to get close to your enemies in order to deal any decent damage, and once you do get close, you kinda have to take cover because you're extremely fragile. Not to mention there are very few locations that give you vertical cover.
In fact, I feel like this game is too short and spends way too much time locking you in linear sections and depriving you of the jetpack, the main attraction of the game. Without it, this is just a poor man's Gears of War.
But the dogfights are really the star of the show here. It's very fun to do maneuvers and outsmart enemies. On top of that, the coolest feature is how you can hijack an enemy aircraft and fully utilize it throughout the battle. Like it's not just a gimmick, they don't break in 5 seconds or limit your movement, they're a decent combat option.
Honestly, instead of crafting a story-driven campaign, they should've just given us procedurally-generated open levels with both ground and air combat happening simultaneously like in Battlefront and Battlefield games, except give us better weapons, higher accuracy, more melee options and maybe some special powers to make us feel like a superhero. Let us dive from the air to the ground with an AOE attack or pluck enemies from the ground like an eagle. Let us kamikaze-attack airships or use a hook to zip towards them. Now that would've been a really fun game. But instead this kinda makes you feel like a dog on a leash in a park. There seems to be so much fun to be had here, but they just don't let you do any of it.
This can’t have been the best they could do.
This game absolutely rocks. Other than a kind of slow and boring turret escort mission and an abrupt ending, the game moves so quickly, helped by its 5-6 hour campaign. The story is serviceable.
Gun selection is small, but there's some really cool ones, especially the designs of them. I especially like how some of them seem to alter their appearance with upgrades. The cover based gameplay is given a little shakeup too compared to normal Gears of War type combat with hiding vertically on ledges and shooting up or downward. The small shift in gravity and perspective leads to some creative enemy disposal methods like tossing a grenade up, or just climbing over the ledge and punching the guys in the face.
The star of the show though is the jetpack which is so cool. After being given the ability to fly, levels open up and let you boost around freely in the skies and land on the ground to just take in the landscapes. While I wish more levels took advantage of this, I think the novelty of some large scale base siege set pieces is neat. Taking out turrets around and then flying into the base to wreck it and its forces from the inside is such a huge power fantasy. I like this one a lot, might not go back to it anytime soon, but I'll definitely be thinking about it for a while.
Gun selection is small, but there's some really cool ones, especially the designs of them. I especially like how some of them seem to alter their appearance with upgrades. The cover based gameplay is given a little shakeup too compared to normal Gears of War type combat with hiding vertically on ledges and shooting up or downward. The small shift in gravity and perspective leads to some creative enemy disposal methods like tossing a grenade up, or just climbing over the ledge and punching the guys in the face.
The star of the show though is the jetpack which is so cool. After being given the ability to fly, levels open up and let you boost around freely in the skies and land on the ground to just take in the landscapes. While I wish more levels took advantage of this, I think the novelty of some large scale base siege set pieces is neat. Taking out turrets around and then flying into the base to wreck it and its forces from the inside is such a huge power fantasy. I like this one a lot, might not go back to it anytime soon, but I'll definitely be thinking about it for a while.
The most forgettable game with the most forgettable title
The story, enemies, and ending were kinda blah, but the aerial combat was genuinely very enjoyable with the amount of control they gave you.
You ever see a one trick pony? I mean like for realsies, in real life. A whole ass pony, with one goddam trick. but like... he real good at the trick, like real good, like real cool...
I played this game when I was 10 and loved it, 10 year old me is objectively correct.
I played this game when I was 10 and loved it, 10 year old me is objectively correct.
Dark Void is a fundamentally boring game with one VERY good mechanic that elevates the entire experience. The shooting is bland, the visuals are bland, the story is bland, but the jetpack gameplay is so legitimately fantastic that none of the other problems matter. I had a great time with this game.