Lee @ SCAN
Reviewer - Lee @ SCANInstallation.
Oh what a pain this game was to install. It started installing very, very slowly, and after 10 minutes of the drive constantly ramping up and down read speed, it decided to dive out and crash back to the desktop without any notification or feedback at all. After experiencing similar issues in the past, I kind of knew what to do here, so I proceeded to remove the disc from the optical drive, give it a quick clean/wipe off and placed back into the optical drive and eventually start the installation process completely. This actually took a while so while the optical drive was making sweet music, I grabbed a quick brew and sat awaiting completion.
Graphics.
Ah... here we go, onto the graphics. The graphics for this game are like the general run-of-the-mill sci-fi type usually reserved for space combat sims. Most of it is dark and moody as it feels like it's trying to influence the mood of the gameplay in some way. Occasionally the grey 'doom' is broken and interupted either by some lighting effects from some of the energy-based weapons, or by some rather nice solar/lunar background. Other than that the graphics are okay but there was a few sections I had to adjust the brightness to actually see in some of the darker levels.
As for the options in regards to the graphics, there is not that much to report that can be adjusted apart from resolution, v-synch, and a few other options which can be adjusted if your PC is not up to the task of rendering everything at the highest quality and detail. It appears that there are not many graphical options to adjust which points towards this being a good port of a console game onto PC.
Click for larger imageSounds & Audio.
Sound in this game is generally very good. You get the usual plethora of noises you would expect from a FPS style game with a few grunts and the odd bit of speech thrown in for good measure. The musical score for this game is very good indeed with a wide range of scores available which also feel like they are trying to influence the mood. After a while it does feel like they've tried to make everything on the game affect the music, with the orchestral score kicking in every couple of minutes, you'd expect that later on, the music will go " dum-dum-derrrr" at the opening of an envelope. Another thing I sort of picked up on was that the voices spoken didn't sometimes reflect what was happening on screen. Rather than having some sort of emotional feedback in their voices, they just seemed to be spoken from a script, recorded and then used within the game at a later date. It's a good job that the cut-scenes could be bypassed by pressing enter to skip them.
Gameplay.
And here we are... to the most important part of the game - GAMEPLAY. This game has a good level of gameplay, but it has been let down by a few little flaws.
I've noticed that clipping on the maps is not that good and several times throughout playing this over the weekend, I had to reload from the last save position as I was stuck between a wall and the floor, or the floor and something invisible that could not be jumped, or rocket-packed over. Another thing to report is the AI of the opposition and this has a few niggles as you can move to certain parts of maps, hide but still be in visible view to the enemy, who do nothing at all when shot at until you breach a certain part of the map where they all of a sudden know your there and respond accordingly. Control-wise, it appears that this game does have a few shortcomings.
Many times I've had the character lock up shooting out a full magazine when all I've wanted was a few controlled bursts to take off a few heads with a nicely placed headshot or two. Trying to narrow down any issues, I resorted to plugging in the xbox 360 wired controller and this worked fine and just made the game feel the same as the xbox version and did not improve or make the gameplay any worse overall, it just allowed those who are more used to using the consoles controller to play the game how they want to play it. Another thing I have noticed is that this game does actually keep you wanting to play it more and more to get passed the part your struggling on. A few times over the weekend, I shut the game down after getting to a point I couldn't pass, only to go back 20 mins later, get passed the part I was having issues with and carry on for a few more levels.
Overall, dark void is not a bad game, but it does have a few areas which could have been polished a little more to make this into an excellent game. If I had to mark this out of 10, I would say around 7/10 as it's good, but nothing special compared to some other titles that are available.
Lee @ SCAN Score - 7/10