Dark Void Catch-All

Dark Void [PC, 360, PS3]

IMAGE(http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/8605/4247190033fa5c025bfc.jpg)

Demo is out on Xbox Live now. Figured I'd make a catch-all for it since it's Capcom's next big game, coming out January 19th.

The demo is short and it's a real hot and cold experience.

[color=red]HOT[/color]
Nolan North does the main character's voice.

[color=blue]COLD[/color]
Nolan North does the main character's voice. They'd might as well call it "The continuing adventures of Nathan Drake! He's escaped the subterranean base and saved the girl, now see as he dashes into the sky on his jet pack!"

[color=red]HOT[/color]
Jet pack flying kind of gives me a Crimson Skies vibe.

[color=blue]COLD[/color]
The ground combat has the usual cover system, 3rd person views, one button melee cinemaction moment and somewhat floaty controls.

[color=red]HOT[/color]
Cool musical score.

[color=blue]COLD[/color]
The demo lasts less than 20 minutes.

All in all, still on the fence. It's going to largely depend on variety, because the mechanics are nothing special so far.

Certis wrote:

[color=blue]COLD[/color]
Nolan North does the main character's voice. They'd might as well call it "The continuing adventures of Nathan Drake! He's escaped the subterranean base and saved the girl, now see as he dashes into the sky on his jet pack!"

So blue is good, right? Nolan North narrates my internal dialogues. LEAVE NOLAN NORTH ALONE!

IMAGE(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/06/Crocker1.JPG)

OK, Video Game developers I know for a fact that there other voice actors in the world besides Nolan North (I've got about ten in my address book), please start casting somebody else from time to time. Otherwise Nolan North is going to become what Jude Law was a couple years ago in movies. The Guy Who's Jude Law in Everything.

I didn't care at all about this game until I heard that Kim Swift had left her job at Valve to go work for Airtight Games. Now that someone I think is cool is working there, I'm hoping that this game turns out good enough that they don't go under.

Downloading the demo. I thought the commercial I saw for it looked awesome.

Hahah, Certis locked the thread that preceeded his by 3 minutes!

Edit: Katy Perry called. She says you owe her $5 in royalties.

Demo did nothing for me. Graphics are eh, controls are eh, framerate is really eh, the ground combat is pure crap, and yea I'm really really really tired of Nolan North.

stevenmack wrote:

The problem with Nolan North isn't neccessarily Nolan North - there was an episode of In Game Chat a while back that did an interview with him and he clearly wants to vary it up a bit and do different voices for things, however everyone that hires him just wants him to keep doing his Nathan Drake voice (at the time he was specifically talking about the Prince from the newest PoP game).

Yea I don't dislike the guy but yea Nolan North as Nathan Drake is really really old now.

The problem with Nolan North isn't neccessarily Nolan North - there was an episode of In Game Chat a while back that did an interview with him and he clearly wants to vary it up a bit and do different voices for things, however everyone that hires him just wants him to keep doing his 'Nathan Drake voice' (at the time he was specifically talking about the Prince from the newest PoP game).

Also, totally forgot to mention that the PC version got reviewed in the February issue of PC Zone. The main comments being:

Good stuff....
- Plot and setting is great
- some pleasant visual moments with the whole verticle cover thing
- air combat is quite good when it works

Bad stuff...
- Unreal Engine Visuals (tm) looks like every other UE shooter
- 'vapid and tedious' shooting
- 'every enemy takes about 40 bullets to the face before going down'
- gimmicky cover system
- mouse control is sluggish and imprecise, so the jet pack stuff is near impossible without a pad

Final paragraph :

Dark Void is a criminal waste of time and energy, as standard and generic a game as you could hope to find, with a couple of little things that raise it out of the meat grinder and back into the land of the living. The flying side of things is reasonable but not worth all the hype, as the main game is a total bore and the plot is wasted on the rest of the package.

Final score 53%

Oh man, I hope this isn't the same as the demo I played back in November, because that was terrible. Too bad too, because I was sorta hoping to get my Tribes fix from this game.

Demo's queued up - will take it for a spin this evening.

I've had my eye on this game for a while, but as we've gotten closer to release, I've been reading less and less exciting things about it.

Probably a good thing given the size of my backlog. And my forwardlog now I come to think of it.

I played a bit of it. It's... There. Nothing offensive really but nothing that makes me scream, "I MUST HAVE THIS NOW!"

The thing that really disappointed me was how restrictive the design felt. I was hoping for a much more sandbox-style sort of experience. This is epitomized in the moment where the game unceremoniously teleported me out of the UFO I'd hijacked because it was time for the on-foot segment, but it can also be seen in the heavy scripting of the level, as well as in how the indoor bit didn't really seem designed to encourage any sort of experimentation with the hover capability.

Obviously this is a tiny (albeit 800MB) slice of the game, and the flight section in particular was set up as a tutorial, but the game, as represented to me by the demo, now seems much less interesting.

Well the demo is at least 3-4 months old now so let's hope it was even older than that and that the game is actually decent.

I have a real desire to like this game, simply because the preview bits I saw focused on attention paid to cool plot and character bits. If it's the usual generic claptrap I'll be a bit saddened; I don't have a problem with ho-hum weapons, ho-hum combat, or ho-hum levels, but if you combine that with ho-hum story + ho-hum characters + ho-hum or non-existent journal/audio log entries, then...

The flying is great fun, the shooting stuff on foot was a total bore. The jetpack thing is brilliant, especially all the special moves you can use to maneuver around. Everything just feels nice and fluid. The weapon on that thing packs a serious punch, which feels great. Running around and shooting just felt bleh though. There's no way I'll even go through the trouble of renting this.

Seems like it has promise, but it's a *terrible* demo.

It just drops you in and doesn't explain how to do anything for combat. I had no idea how I managed to suddenly stop and start shooting a machine gun when I was flying, or what the orange square meant when saucers are flying by.

Will consider renting the game to see if it's any good.

The PC demo is out now. Yeah, it's not very good. Also the default PC controls are terrible. The default mouse sensitivity for flight is way too low. Also they expect you to use the mouse like a joystick so you have to level off any changes to your pitch or you'll just start doing flips and get easily disoriented. I haven't played any games with a flight sim aspect in a while but I thought the convention was to just have the aircraft go in the direction the mouse points rather than using it as a simulation for aircraft controls. It's poorly suited for the task since there's no real "default" position to the mouse. Also it's not like the air combat is very demanding in terms of precision since it seems like all you have to do is press the lock on button and fire and it seems like you'll eventually kill the targets. The ground combat is kind of a blend between Gears of War cover mechanics and more traditional run and gun first person shooters, kinda meh. You can just run up and spam the melee button to get through a lot of the combat in the demo.

I played the demo and I thought it was pretty good. Aiming while in flight was difficult and the ground combat was iffy. The melee animations were pretty satisfying, but will probably get repetitive after a while. I'm definitely going to play it though, if only for nostalgia. I loved Crimson Skies and one of the best games I ever played on xbox was Armed and Dangerous. The jetpack combat in Armed and Dangerous was exactly the same as this and it worked really well back then so no reason why it shouldn't work now.

I picked this up on Steam today because it's only $40 - did it launch at that price or has it already dropped?

Anyway, it's not half bad. I'm really digging the characters and setting. The combat is pretty much a serviceable Gears clone, so if you enjoyed Gears of War you probably won't be too turned off by this. I did hate the decision to put sprint on the left stick though, that's just dumb. I've played about an hour and I'm already hopping around with a jetpack and doing the fun vertical cover thing. I think it's totally worth the price it's at.

Dark void on PS3 and 360 is down to £14.99 at Play.com already. Not a good sign.

I was just thinking that 21 posts in the thread in 4 weeks was ominous.

Yup, the game tanked almost as hard as Bionic Commando did. It does not bode well for Capcom's experiment of using Western developers to start up new franchises. I wonder if Kim Swift will be asking for her job at Valve back.