Title: Dark Void
Genre: 3rd Person Action
Developer: Airtight Games
Publisher: Capcom
Rating: ESRB - T (Moderate Violence)
Formats: Xbox 360, PS3, PC (Retail, and Digital Download)
Release Date: 19/01/2010 (US), 22/01/2010 (EU)

Synopsis:
Set in an alternative WW2, William Grey is a backwater courier pilot, who accepts a package from a mysterious source. In addition to the package, it comes with a bodyguard, in the form of a familiar woman. During the trip, the plane hits some difficulties near the Bermuda Triangle, during which the plane is decimated, and William blacks out. He wakes up surrounded by wreckage, the woman, and a lush jungle in the middle of some mesas. They then find a village, and meet up with Nikola Tesla, where things start taking a turn for the strange. Expect aliens, robots, flying, and some seriously huge enemies.

Let's get something over with first. Turned up high, Dark Void is the perfect woman. Looks and substance are provided in spades, by the Unreal3 engine providing the looks, and the latest revision of Ageia's PhysX engine keeping things off of the CPU. Sparks, rocks, falling debris, ragdolls... All present and correct in this.

Dark Void is a 3rd person action game, which manages to skip between ground cover-based fighting, vertical cover based fighting, and dogfights. Yeah, cover based shooters, and chest high walls have been done to death before (Gears anyone?), but where Dark Void gives it a new slant, is the axis. While a good lot of the fighting is done on your traditional horizontal plane, all of a sudden, you're doing it on a vertical plane, with the aid of a trusty jetpack.

Now, the flying sections may put a few people off of this, just because it's flying... In a leather Bomber jacket... During "WW2"... But fret not, there's not a Messerschmidt in sight (Ok, I lie... There's one that you see towards the end of the game), but despite switching between walking and flying with all the speed of a Transformer, it's surprisingly easy to go between the different thought processes. Well.... It was after about 2 hours, when I'd finally managed to stop slamming into walls within seconds of taking off...

Combat itself flows nicely, with enemies taking cover, sending grenades, blindfire, and suicide troops at you in healthy doses. Enemies themselves didn't tend to attempt to flank that much, even on the harder difficulty, which rather trivialises combat, for those of us who rampaged through Gears of War on Veteran. Although, even if they did, you always have the rocket pack, giving you the height you need for a strategic advantage...

Right?

Wrong. Most of the areas that you're fighting through are either indoors, or have a very low, and unforgiving ceiling, which my character's head felt a few times. Even those few wide open spaces where you're not tied into ground fighting by the underpowered jetpack, you're tethered to an NPC, of such great intellect, that they make the random jumpsuited people in Half-Life 2 seem like AI versions of Einstein. Sections of the game tend to be one or the other. While dropships throw an endless stream of Watchers at you, the temptation is there to zoom off, and strafe the whole place. But alas, the second I took off, I was shot down by the dropship's AA cannons. Done out of line of sight, I managed one strafe, before the Watchers took apart the Survivor base I was trying to help protect.

Later sections of the game see you escorting the Survivor's main ship, the Ark, through a canyon filled with Watchers. All to dock at a place, and speak to some child, receive a prophecy about being "The One", or "The Key" (I can't remember which), and the whole game took on a drastic twist.

I was suddenly not playing a 3rd person game. I was suddenly playing The Matrix. Skinned with WW2 machine guns, and pewpew laz0rs.

Enough of the faults though. Dark Void is a essentially what you'd get if you mixed WW2, War of the Worlds, The Matrix, Gears of War, and Resident Evil together. Yes, when you blow the heads off of the enemy squad leaders, the little alien inside them jumps out, and attacks... Resident Evil 4/5 people?
It's a pretty shooter, with a huge twist of vertical combat, and dogfighting. While the "boss" fights are very much a case of keeping the flying under control (Yes, they're all aerial fights...), then lining up crosshairs at weak points, clearly defined, and fucking glowing weak points (I so wish I were kidding. You fight an enemy called The Collector, and you kill it by shooting at the glowing nodules inside its stomach), they have a certain cinematic nature to them, with lens flares, rockets and machine gun fire being exchanged, over what appears to be a mile long drop.

Story wise, think the Matrix, just with a little less mindfuckery. William is the one person who can close the bridge from the Void to Earth, the lynchpin in both the Collectors', and the Survivors' collective plans, and you can largely fill in the blanks from there. Personally, the less said about the story, the better...

Scores!

Graphics: Unreal3, and PhysX combined make this one pretty motherfucker. Lighting is a little poor in any non-Collector ships, and even then, it's still a little low - B+
Gameplay: Slick shooter controls, special actions explained on the screen. Intuitive flight controls, and a slow learning curve keeps the game fairly neutral, letting the player concentrate on looking at the shinies around the place - B
Re-playability: Brought to you by the same people that were responsible for Resident Evil, Dark Void has a slew of collectables, tech upgrades for the weapons, and multiple difficulty levels - C+

Overall: Not a bad game, but definitely lacking the polish that you expect from a AAA studio. Ending just happens suddenly, with very little build up, and for it to fall on both Normal and Hard difficulties in the same day, this game is way shorted than you'd expect for something that costs about £40. Despite the great looks, and the solid controls, the game itself is let down by both the lack of difficulty, and the lack of replay factor for a AAA release - C-

Also, Mr Croshaw has done Dark Void as well. Always worth a watch for some extra points that I've not covered (Mainly through it not being a video, nor something I get paid to do )