SnootyJim
Reviewer - Snooty JimThe good:
You can shoot things, and it comes with a manual. Mildly satisfying to watch protagonist hurl himself to his death.
The bad:
No matter how clever the storyline is, how well-designed the characters are, and how revolutionary the gameplay is, if it's dogged by technical issues, it'll be a poor game. Dark Void is almost certainly the most buggy game I've ever played... in no particular order, I have
* fallen straight through the floor twice, with no obvious reason, into deadly oblivion
* spent over 2 hours trying to install the game from the disk, until I gave up and ran it from hard drive
* sent dead enemies' bodies hurtling through the air by nudging them with my leg
* suffered constant framerate issues, despite recording around 140 fps the rest of the time, causing the game to periodically skip ahead a second or two, so I can watch myself hurtle off ledges or run straight into enemy units
* struggled to aim properly, as the camera moves in an extremely jerky manner
* walked over ammo crates 5 or 6 times before they are actually registered and picked up
* shot enemies around 20 times without them reacting at all, until they die
* crashed to desktop repeatedly at the same point in the game
Click for larger imageSo I'm completely unable to continue with the game beyond my current (very early) point. The game also fails to save my progress, despite me passing a checkpoint on the way there, so to reach the crash to desktop requires 5-10 minutes of play-time from the previous savepoint. Not particularly tempted to keep retesting I'm afraid.
The most irritating part of this, by far, is the aiming and the framerate. They're probably linked, and basically stop the game from being any fun at all. When you're fighting with the targeting reticule to make it move properly, it's difficult to have fun. The section at the beginning where you fly around is really hard to control as well, which makes it a fairly unenjoyable experience. And watching the game stop, and then fly into action a few seconds later, as the protagonist continues running straight over the edge of a cliff is irritating. Well, only from the playing perspective. Watching the annoying [expletive] sod off and die is somewhat therapeutic.
Which brings me to the next gripe... the voice acting and script is awful. All of the main characters sound permanently disinterested in everything that involves them. It feels as though 90% of the script is based around the words "Oh", "Eh?" and "Meh." And of course, it's all horribly cliched, with such classics as
"Oh, this random person I've got to meet looks like that person that was at one point the love of my life."
"Yes, I am."
"Oh. I see."
"Quick! There's a man on the ground!"
*Checks pulse* "He's dead."
"Oh. Bye."
"My goodness, this giant rockfall has somehow caused us to become separated. How unlikely. Whatever shall we do?" "Don't fear, we've got this handy two-way radio system that we can now engage, until we find each other again." "Good thinking. And we'll only talk into it very occasionally for no particular reason, so that the other person can respond and tell us that they're in serious danger. Because they didn't think it worth mentioning previously."
The physics engine, flawed as mentioned in the earlier bugs section, also managed to provide some ridiculous visuals - everything appears to have been filmed on the moon. The protagonist looks a bit like a rabbit when he jumps, and then hangs endlessly in the air. Equally, Ava (the love interest) flails her arms around, in a similarly moon-walk-like manner as her forearms float mysteriously in the air as she runs. They look a bit like a pair of spring-operated table legs with a hinge in the middle, bouncing around for no obvious reason.
Other smaller gripes include:
The complete lack of any noise in the menu system... I thought I'd muted the game somehow and went back to Windows to check the mixer, but there just isn't any. Sound only starts when the game begins. It feels very odd indeed.
There are loads of invisible walls that prevent you from walking off the edge of the map - I thought we'd stopped with those things years ago, but clearly not.
The enemies are completely brain-dead, running around aimlessly and routinely charging out of cover so that they can be mowed down by your machine gun. Others just stand around doing nothing until you kill them.
The camera angle on the ledge sections is dreadful. I thought I'd found a bug in the game at first, but that's actually how it's meant to be.
There are barely any graphical settings to alter to improve performance. And even when they're at max, the textures look dreadful up close. The graphics generally are okay, but not up to the calibre of other recent titles like Just Cause 2, and it performs far worse so I've got no idea what the reason is. Dodgy port presumably?
No save function - a real pain in the neck when you have problems like my crash to desktop, as it's very nauseating to replay a certain portion of the game 20 times to find the source of the problem.
In conclusion:
I was shocked to find that it's been out as long as it has... I had assumed this was a pre-release sample yet to go through bug-testing, but clearly not. Despite having zero expectations, I'm still disappointed by Dark Void. I have absolutely no idea what it's meant to do, or what it's meant to be.
It's a long time since I've played a game that I've found so actively unenjoyable to play... it's probably toe-to-toe with Fortix on that front. And I thought Fortix was a rip-off at £3. Oh dear.