Obscured View

I can’t remember the last time I sat down and finished a game in 1.5 sittings.  That translates to around 5 hours of play.

I had a lot of hope for Dark Void when it was announced.  There’s so much potential in the idea of a free-flying Rocketeer type game.  Sure, it seemed like it was biting off more than it could chew (flying, ground combat, platforming, etc.), but there was such a great road map of things to avoid (the Iron Man game for one) and plenty to inspire (The Rocketeer film, Crimson Skies… which this team made!) that I thought this one would “get it” and go towards the latter rather than the former.

Wow, was I wrong.

So if you’re making a game involving shooting and guns, you really should get those right.  The default weapon in the game (a machine gun) is buggy.  The problem: the gun can’t hit anything up close.  Apparently the bullet emitter is just a bit too far ahead of the muzzle on the model, or they’re moving to fast, or it’s just bad logic; the shit is broke regardless.  At point-blank range, only one in every 10 bullets or so doesn’t spawn past an enemy in front of you.  Sigh.  This gets worse as you upgrade the gun, too.  At one point, it seems I was doing no damage at all with it while closing for a melee attack.  The shots were hitting the wall behind the enemy instead.

Speaking of melee, it doesn’t fare any better.  Instead of making melee a dynamic part of the game, there’s canned animations for every melee attack.  This means that once you start a melee attack, you’re locked into it and can’t move or shoot until the animation is over.  The canned thing is nice when you need health to regenerate (you’re apparently invulnerable while doing melee), but isn’t nice for game play flow.  It’s jarring and very unsatisfying.  Damage from melee is a joke too.  The basic robots you fight you can 1-hit kill.  Everything else?  Try 3 to 6 melee attacks.  Or better yet, don’t try it, because it isn’t worth doing.

Machine-gun aside, there are other weapons that are more fun to use, notably the alien version of the machine gun, which has none of the basic machine gun issues and has upgrades that make it well worth using.  This likely has to do with the bullets being projectiles rather than raycasts with effect.  The other weapons vary from kinda meh to not really that useful.  The gravity gun seems fun, but there’s nothing to do with it outside of one level that you get it on.  The sniper rifle, even fully upgraded, can’t headshot and quickly kill most enemies… most of the time.  Again I’m thinking they have some really bad collision detection with raycast weapons.  The tesla cannon is fun for the mission you get it in, but not much else.

Lastly, the game makes one horrible mistake with aiming.  Where I’m looking (center screen) when I go into aiming mode doesn’t naturally become where the reticule is looking.  So, even if I’m in cover and move the camera to basically center on an enemy in the distance, as the view zooms in, I’ll be looking somewhere completely different, requiring me to re-aim once I’m zoomed in, making the entire point of general aiming worthless.  Any modern shooter has this working correctly, but not in this game.

So ground combat isn’t great, but then again the game is about flying, right?  With a cool jetpack!  That’s awesome!

Well, it should be, but it’s not.

Flying is a mess.  You have a poor sensation of speed.  The boost and brake abilities don’t do enough to speed you up or slow you down; Boost is too slow, and flying with brakes on feels still too fast.  There’s no way to lock on to enemies and get even a basic targeting / gutter arrow to tell you the direction of your target.  You can hold down a button to focus on the nearest enemy while trying to steer, shoot, and aim, but it’s uncomfortable on your hand to do so for more than a few seconds at a time.  Some enemies have flight trails behind them, but they’re not long enough and you can’t vary your speed enough to track them well anyway.  It’s easier to boost away from stuff, U-turn, then just shoot and repeat.  Dog-fighting is not enjoyable… in a game about dog-fighting.

Enemies have targeting reticules around them to call them out from friendly aircraft… sometimes.  There is no rhyme or reason to why you sometimes see them and sometimes don’t.  It’s not distance based, and has nothing to do with their health or yours.  Sometimes you just don’t get reticules to call out enemies, and other times you do.

You have a context action that you can do while flying to hijack an enemy craft or kill a few “boss” type enemies.  It’s tedious and boring, and like melee attacks, locks you into a canned animation as you fly automatically to the enemy craft.  This is really fun when the brilliant AI of an enemy decides to suicide below the game horizon, or is shot down by one of your AA guns and falls to its death as your guy is flying to the ship.  You end up flying right after it and directly into the abyss.  Some checkpoints can be far enough apart that this makes replaying the same mission sequence very tedious.

If you avoid canned death and get to the craft, you end up in this bad version of a simon game, except to win their version of Simon, you just hold down one button.  If the enemy shoots at you, you have to stop holding the button and move to another part of the ship… and just sit there unable to progress with the hijack until it stops shooting.  sometimes it tries to shake you off, requiring you to mash a random face button for a few moments.  Once that’s done, you move back to the panel and hold the button down more.  You repeat this until you pull off the panel to get to the pilot, then wiggle the stick to kill him and take the craft.  I can’t understand the call to make the path to success the most boring choice possible.  Where’s the quicktime event of hitting a few buttons in rapid succession?  Man, just take a look at any larger monster fight in God of War for inspiration.  Taking over an enemy craft has never been so unexciting.  Well, I guess it could have been more boring — just don’t do anything in order to succeed.

The other problem with many of the aerial levels is that it’s actually more efficient to jump into one of the AA turrets and shoot down the enemies.  The AA guns do more damage, are more accurate, and take a more punishment than you can with your rocket pack, even when upgraded with better guns.  When the main draw of your game isn’t the most efficient and rewarding way to fight enemies, you have a serious problem.

Finally, the story is bad.  Not cheesy and somewhat fun in a bad way like Darkstalkers was… like just bad.  Here’s an example:  You’re fighting robots and UFOs the entire game… and then suddenly at the end you’re fighting a giant mecha-dragon.  HUH?  Or what about Nikola Tesla being killed by an impostor Tesla who then doesn’t take Tesla’s place and cause havoc, but just stabbity-stab-stabs and… leaves?!  He doesn’t even try to sabotage your ship while he’s right there.  So weak.

I could go on, but this game doesn’t deserve any more words spent on it.

The TLDR version: Lack of good feedback on actions, poor controls, weak weapon balance, poorly paced upgrades, bad story, mediocre graphics.

6/10 on a good day.  Ouch.