Thoughts on games, work, and… well, mostly games

I downloaded the Dark Void demo for PS3.  Only when I heard the music did I remember something I’d forgotten: Bear McCreary scored the game.  The Battlestar Galactica Season 3 soundtrack is my favorite of all the music I own, and when I heard the music start in the Dark Void demo it all came flooding back to me.  Good times.

The Dark Void soundtrack can be preordered on Amazon.  And I can preorder it.  And I will.

The game itself is intriguing.  I’m optimistic about it.  The premise has promise: use a jetpack to fly anywhere, explore a big world, land on anything, and enjoy combat both on land and in the air.  I anticipate lots of things to discover.

When I first turned on the jetpack for the first time, I dove downward and crashed into a mountainside.  Herein lies a problem with the PS3 not shared by the Xbox 360: I can’t set my personal defaults such that my Y-axis is inverted.

Once I got the hang of it, flying became easy enough.  The controls were a little hypersensitive, and that became more apparent in combat.  I found it difficult to track enemies in flight.  The only assistance the game gives you in flight is a button that orients the camera (not you) toward the nearest enemy, at which point it becomes your responsibility to orient the hero in the same way.  While this assistance is active, the targeting reticle disappears, and when it reappears it likely won’t be on top of your target.  I found that I overcorrected almost every time, resulting in my having to re-correct before I opened fire.  (I was wrong.)

When I landed in the first tower, I found combat even more difficult.  Here the controls were definitely hypersensitive.  The cover system felt clumsy, not responding to the Square button and analog sticks as I expected.  Likewise with melee combat, which I think could have taken a lesson from Shadow Complex.  Long story short, the game seemed to have trouble deciding whether to respond to your control or not.  Sometimes it would, other times it wouldn’t.  Without reliable controls, and without any targeting assistance to counteract hypersensitive controls, combat seemed needlessly hard.

I laughed the first time I accidentally activated the jetpack in a hallway.  There was no recovering from it; it flung me against floor, wall, floor, ceiling, and floor again, where I subsequently bled to death.  This made me wonder two things: first, will the game make use of this, forcing you to pull off a close-quarters jetpack maneuver in order to escape something horrible?  And second, how many times will I do this by accident before it starts to piss me off?

Moving on.  The art direction seems solid if not a bit derivative.  I wouldn’t have thought to blend a steampunk aesthetic with, for lack of a better description, “Geth chic”.  But it could work.

Backing up a bit… the opening cutscene was just confusing.  I’m afraid to ask who the hero’s Egyptian stoner sidekick is, for fear I’ll get an answer.  But he was just odd.

The demo felt a bit short, spending too much time in dark corridors instead of the great wide open, where I think this game will shine.  Surely they could have spent more time showing off the player’s ability to interact with the environment while in flight.  Didn’t I see a shot somewhere of the hero clinging to an platform on which he’d perched to take mid-air cover?  Where was that in the demo?  And what about being able to tinker with the upgrades?  Eh… smacks of rush.

So I wonder about the gameplay, love the music, dig the visuals, and feel good about the possibilities offered by a jetback-fueled open-world game that seems to want to innovate in the field of creative combat mechanics.