Surge from the past again, this time I’m well past the launch of Space Marine 2, I didn’t buy it yet because I don’t want to spend a shitload of money on games this month; I am waiting for Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster to come out. Anyways, I’m sort of going through my backlog of purchased games as I wait for DRDR, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to play another Capcom game in the meantime. I recall this game getting absolutely no love when it came out, and the extremely rare times it was referenced, it was not in a flattering way.
So what is Dark Void?
Interestingly, Capcom only published this title, the now-defunct studio called Airtight Games was the developer. The 2010’s were definitely an interesting time for Capcom to say the least, their push to appeal to Western audiences really had the company in a downward spiral that turned into a tailspin as they were dashed against the stones. That Mega Man creator convincing the entire company to adopt this strategy is insane. I’m glad Mighty Number 9 failed; fuck you, Inafune. Go make some more NFTs you dipshit lmao.
Airtight Games also developed Murdered: Soul Suspect. Is this foreshadowing? Who knows.
STORY
Dark Void begins with an in medias res that has you flying through the air as an iconic 7th Console Generation white man with a buzzcut. You are given a quick tutorial right before you’re thrusted into a dogfight scenario with alien flying saucers. After splashing several bogies with very loose and less-than-satisfying flying controls, you take a hit that grounds you and massive mech lands to finish you off with a blinding laser beam.
You are then taken to not to the past, but one week into the future, just before World War 2; you are no longer the buzzcut white man, you are now A dark-haired white man voiced by Nolan North. Who also kind of looks like Nolan North. Man, the 7th Gen fucking sucked when it came to casting. Anyways, the protagonist’s name is Will, he has a full name but I don’t care to look it up. So after Will is contracted to escort a passenger in his plane, it is revealed that the two are former lovers; the woman’s name is Ava. On their way to their destination they fly through the Bermuda Triangle, where they are then transported to another world that is the primary location of the game, simply named the ‘Void.’
Skipping ahead— SPOILERS IN THESE NEXT THREE PARAGRAPHS BY THE WAY, Will and Ava soon find themselves entrenched in a war. They fight alongside humans known as “Survivors”, who battle for their survival against an enemy known as the “Watchers.” At first Will wants to leave the Void as soon as possible, his goal in the beginning is to repair an air-worthy plane with Nikola Tesla; he soon becomes a reluctant hero, then a 3rd Person genocidal paragon of humanity. Oh yeah, Nikola Tesla is here for some unexplained reason; he should to be in his late 70’s at this point in history, but he looks more closely designed after his well-known photograph, which was taken in his 30’s. Tesla invented Nolan’s backpack, gave an indigenous civilization electricity, and some other third thing, probably. What a nice, kindhearted colonizer.
Very quickly you learn that all the bipedal robots you’ve been fighting are being piloted by slug-like aliens, it’s an incredibly lackluster reveal pretty early in the narrative. You do a bunch of war stuff and later you are captured by the Watchers and learn of their plan to use the Bermuda Triangle as a portal to invade Earth, also that they’ve been meddling with the Human race ever since it was a mere fledging species. Their reason for only now intervening in the course Humanity is going down, is the eve of harnessing the power of the atom. The Watchers experienced nuclear weaponry and it ended up decimating their civilization; to prevent humans from doing the same, they see it best to subjugate them and force them to labor until they die. What mean, rotten colonizers.
Your mission changes from beating the Watchers to stopping their invasion of Earth in the ACTUAL LAST MISSION OF THE GAME I SWEAR TO GOD. The siege to close the portal to Earth is already underway as the final chapter’s intro cutscene plays, then they introduce a final boss that was neither established earlier nor has the same design philosophy as the rest of the enemy faction. Why is it just a dragon with robot heads? The other huge mechs don’t look exactly like any singular creature, the final boss does. I guess they ran out time to design something more unique, just like they ran out of time to finish their story. Will and Ava close the portal, because she is mortally wounded, Ava stays behind in the Void to seal the portal from her side. Why does it need two people to close it? I dunno.
There is a limp-wrist cliffhanger implying that Will still has a battle with the Watchers to wage. Who cares.
Going back just a bit, the Watchers’ villainous intentions are revealed via a video playing on an iMax screen while you’re having a shootout with small waves of bipedal mechs, leaving the possibility for the player to just run out of the room where the lore is. The video perfectly loops like a tiktok video so you can actually listen to the speech after killing all the Watchers, but it is a terrible way to deliver incredibly important story information.
Dark Void’s story is meandering and misses any sort of initial hook to draw the audience in, and fast tracks the ‘true story’ last minute because they wasted so much time lollygagging around a desolate and boring 7th Generation-ass world with equally bland and flat characters. If there was meant to be more story in between the last 2 chapters then I’m glad it was cut, it wouldn’t have done anything but waste more of your time. Stuff happens for sure and I don’t quite know what it is, but it’s not story.
GAMEPLAY
Let’s move on to gameplay now, inarguably the best part of the game.
Dark Void follows early 7th console generation gameplay trends: RE4-style over the shoulder aiming; and a cover system that tries to be different from Gears of War’s by switching ‘A’ button inputs with any other button, but just ends up feeling more unintuitive because of it. The fact this title has a cover system does a great disservice to get entire core of the gameplay; as soon as you begin running around and shooting guns you can feel the speed of the game, it feels like the developers *want* you to play aggressively while strafing, hip-firing and jumping around. Instead, the enemy bots will begin to beam you down if you’re out of cover for too long. It’s a shame really, this could have been a pretty fun experience, if it were only brave enough to forego the cover system. This game does do something unique in terms of a cover system, however.
Rather than having only waist-high cover and corners to cower behind, Dark Void also gives the player the chance to take cover on the Y-axis. In several instances you will either have to ascend or descend a mountain or alien structure, as you approach the edge of a platform you can use the cover button to snap the camera into position and you can shoot either directly above or below you. By having your reticle hover over cover ahead of you, your character will jump towards it and use it as cover. The system works fine, and simply walking away from the ledge will return the camera to its normal position, I appreciate that the game doesn’t make this mechanic feel overly-committal. My previous criticism still stands, this system slows down a game that would have benefited from being a lot faster.
Dark Void is a hybrid game in a way, one part Gears of War, one part Ace Combat. Not long into the game you get a jetpack, at first it merely lets you high-jump and slowly descend; after a bit more time you are granted an advanced prototype pack that Nikola Tesla has completed, this one allows you to actually fly through the air.
You have all the traditional movements a flying game like AC would have: pitch, yaw, and roll; with a combination of buttons you can perform evasive maneuvers like barrel rolling. As with the cover mechanics, everything works fine, but is underwhelming and lacks a responsiveness that feels good.
Being a human with 2 mini jet engines strapped to his back, you’d think Will would have the superior agility in the sky. You’d be fucking wrong. The alien crafts you’ll be dogfighting with are incredibly nimble, far outclassing you. Will has painfully slow turns even while breaking, performing an accurate turn feels impossible and has forced me to course correct by forcing Will back in the other direction, and the evasive tricks the game offers you have incredibly clunky inputs and are completely unreliable in combat. One of the worst things about the aerial combat is controlling the jetpack’s speed, in which I mean you can’t. Upon launching yourself into the air, the engines very quickly reach their max speed and remain there with no way to move faster or slower, like how a throttle controls a plane’s speed. Of course there are buttons mapped to the controller for braking and afterburners for a speed boost, but after using either of them you just return to the standard cruise speed.
This gameplay decision feels like it was done to streamline flying so you can focus on maneuvering and target acquisition in combat, but I argue it makes the gameplay objectively worse and strips out the thrill of aerial combat. It’s like the developers didn’t understand what makes the gameplay in flying games feel so satisfying. It’s the control of your speed and momentum for me, I love braking so hard that my engine nearly stalls as I make a sharp turn to run down a new target. Before I move on to the next portion of gameplay, I want to emphasize that Will only has machine guns as offensive weapons by default while flying; unless you drop a lot of upgrade points to unlock missiles, that’s now it’s going to stay for the entire game. Does it sound like fun yet?
Once you obtain the jetpack you are free to activate whenever you wish, so long as the game doesn’t rip it off your back for some story reason. This means you can take off in a flash if the enemy pins you down and has you on the brink of death, or disengage from an aerial pursuit to lay down fire from the weapons you carry. This marriage between two different gameplay styles would be great and offer plenty of replayability if levels are designed to encourage experimentation.
They’re not.
There’s boring 3rd person shooting arenas/hallways, and wide open canyons to fly in. If you try to perform aerial strafing runs during a Gears of War section you’ll just be dragging out the combat encounter without killing anything. Were you to try and hover and attempt to shoot an enemy ship during an Ace Combat you’ll also be wasting your time because the ship will already be out of the weapon’s effective range. Very cool. To be fair, it is really funny to accidentally activate the jetpack inside a building and see Will crush his skull into dust and die immediately.
MUSIC
During these reviews I write I’m usually listening to the game’s soundtrack to better focus on writing and stay somewhat immersed in the game even if it’s been a few days since i finished it. And to also write this portion more objectively. Imagine the music in an action/adventure movie, like Indiana Jones or Star Wars. Now think of that same music again, this time without the recognizable leitmotif that it most likely has. That’s the best way I can describe the soundtrack of Dark Void; it sounds good for what it’s trying to be, but it lacks something that gives it an identity.
SOUND
The sound design is terribly unremarkable. The weapons are loud and repetitive, the jetpack hums as you fly, the enemy mechs blow up and that definitely has a sound effect, I’m sure.
ART
The art direction could have aged worse, the game doesn’t quite go for realism across the board. The human characters are slightly exaggerated with idealized features; Tesla looks like his human counterpart, Ava is very conventionally attractive, and Will looks like Nolan North. The vast amount of locations you’ll be visiting are very basic and forgettable, there are mountains and trees with not much else. The alien interiors are by-the-numbers sci-fi, plenty of shiny metals and bright LEDs. Weapon designs are not noteworthy, which I suppose goes for all of the art, if I’m going to be honest. There’s no visual flare in anything, there is absolutely nothing cool enough to make fanart of.
Will’s design only looks cool in the official promotional art, which is something I wasn’t expecting. I think his outfit looks sharp and has a great contrast between the leather jacket and the high-tech helmet he dons, with the jetpack standing as a nice blend between the two; it’s has some design cues from Atomic Age art, so it has a futuristic look from the past. All this only applies to the art outside of the game. In action the design falls apart; the jacket is faded, distressed, and unappealing to look at; the helmet only looks good from the front, which you rarely see while playing; and the jetpack design is too futuristic to offer a genuine ‘old meets new’ aesthetic. Also, Will’s pants and boots are 1000% drab and only contribute to making the outfit worse; just redo the design and make it good next time.
CLOSING
My previous review covered Hydrophobia, an incomplete indie game that had a singular gameplay feature that was done well; for those who didn’t read the review, it was the water. Dark Void tries to do a lot and isn’t able to pull of a single compelling feature; the cover shooter aspect clashes heavily with the concept of being a guy with jetpack on his back, the story meanders with hardly any consequential character development/interaction unfolding, and the ‘1940s meets futuristic alien tech’ is utilized so poorly that Will may as well have been a modern day character because it matters that little. The decision to include Nikola Tesla still baffles me, why is he there? He does things, but he’s just a vessel for the plot to advance so those actions are predominantly offscreen, if not entirely.
Dark Void is a title that Capcom published and Airtight Games developed, it came at a time when Capcom was inarguably losing their mojo and influence in the gaming space. The company develops great games and have awesome IPs, they’re absolutely one of favorite companies in gaming; it is unfortunate that this praise can’t be extended to their publishing, specifically when the titles are developed by teams outside the company. Dark Void lacks any characteristics that Capcom games have, the primary one being fun. Good job on that one, Keiji Inafune.
Reptilian Space Illuminati/10
