The best thing about B-list titles is that they can afford to take chances on new gameplay ideas where AAA titles generally cost so much to make that they need to rely on the tried and true to ensure that they sell millions of copies and make all those little dollar signs just pile up.
Dark Void tells a heartwarming tale about the bermuda triangle, evil alien nazi robots, and what really happened to Nikola Tesla and Amelia Earhart. And it does so from a third-person/top-down/bottom-up perspective.
The story begins with our WWII-era hero loading up his airplane for a routine transport job. The job immediately becomes something other than routine, however, when he finds out his client is none other than the proverbial 'one that got away.'
After some less-than-subtle exposition for the sole purpose of fleshing out the backstories of characters we have yet to be made to give a damn about, we find ourselves sucked into the Bermuda Triangle which, it seems, is actually a gateway to the Void: a world between our dimension and one belonging to a snakelike alien race. The snake people, it seems, have few hobbies- chief among them appears to be being worshipped as gods, but they're also dab hands in the fields of Blue Death Ray technology, and Evil Robotics- both of which they sent through the Void to aid the Nazis on their quest for conquest.
Are the snake people Nazis? The game never says explicitly, but somehow I doubt it... but all this story nonsense is really beside the point- the story itself serves perfectly well as a vehicle to provide an ultimate objective(fighting off the aliens and thereby saving the world from the Nazis), but that's about it.
The first two or three levels in the game offer you a crash course in fighting from cover and common platforming elements.
On the ground, cover is king. But not one of those badass warrior kings, no, it's kinda like...
the king of hearts in Disney's Alice in Wonderland- he's a king, sure, but he doesn't do as much as you think he ought to. Oftentimes, you'll be doing just fine cracking Robo-skulls with the precise application of ballistic force right up until the flying Nazibots render your concrete slab useless as a Blue Death Ray-absorbing bulwark by flying upward to get a clear shot at you.
Shooting from cover is not a new idea- cover systems in 3rd person gaming can be traced back as far as 1999's Nintendo 64 release Winback: Covert Operations. Part of what makes Dark Void stand out in this regard has to do with how the cover mechanic works- any joker can duck behind a pile of rocks. Dark void takes it further with vertical combat- the idea that the Evil Nazibots don't just come at you from the front, they're ready to come from any direction.
If you're on top, they'll come from below; covering on the underside of the platforms beneath you and making you earn the drop to the next piece of cover as you advance downward.
Of course, "vertical" goes both ways, and with the aid of the hoverpack(which allows you to-surprise, surprise!- hover for a short time) which you get a couple of levels later, so will you- the screens don't really do justice to the vertical perspective; you really have to see it for yourself.
Two or three levels after that, you hit gold: The jetpack.
With the jetpack, you can get flying with a simple double tap of the jump button. Just watch out for those cliff faces- bouncing off of them in flight mode is extremely hazardous to your personal well-being. The flight controls take some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, the jetpack becomes one of the most novel experiences on current generation game consoles. Up until this point, the game has proven itself to be a competent, if uninspired, 3rd person shooter, but with the jetpack it becomes so much more- promoting a do-anything approach to destroying nazibots, you can fight from cover on the ground, you can strafe the enemy positions using the
heavy caliber machine guns and magnetic rockets attached to your jetpack (earned by upgrading your jetpack with points accumulated by destroying the enemy), commandeer friendly-or hijack enemy- aircraft, or any combination of these tactics- or make up your own- the game gives you the tools, you decide how to use them to the fullest effect.
The most unfortunate part of this brilliantly concocted mishmash of genres is that at one point near the end of the game you lose the jetpack and being forced back into the "3rd person cover shooter" format seems to tarnish the experience to the point where I stopped playing the game altogether for a time. It isn't that the 3rd person aspect is bad, it's more because the ability to switch the game from a run of the mill shooter to a way out Jetpack Combat Flight sim is such a neat trick that I felt hobbled without it.
In the end: as a videogame- a source of entertainment- as something to have fun with, it is excellent 4/5.
And to anyone wondering about the tagline:
Something Old= 3rd person shooters
Something New= The jetpack
Something Borrowed= The cover mechanic
Something Blue= Evil robot lasers
No comments:
Post a Comment