Review | Dark Void
Format: PC/Xbox360/PS3 | Genre: Action | Publisher: Capcom | Developer: Airtight Games | Release date: 22/01/10 | RRP: £29.99-£44.99
Dark Void tries to be about outlandish conspiracy theories and the Bermuda Triangle. But what it’s really about is jetpacks and smashing slug robots in the face with your fist. And shooting. It’s always got to be about shooting.
You see, you’re a strapping young hero in the late 1930s, and naturally, due to the international tensions of the time, and the fascists, your flight path takes you over the Bermuda Triangle, and you crash land. On an island.
Except it’s not just any island. It’s the island that’s in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle that doesn’t exist. So, naturally, it’s full of Aztec ruins and snake gods that are actually serpentine robots that all want to kill you. So you kill them right back.
Dark Void makes it clear very early on that it’s not going to be clever, or respectful, with its narrative. It’s got Nikolai Tesla and it’s got lizards with robots, and it’s got jetpacks. The only problem is, it doesn’t want you to play around with them. Jetpacks are serious business, didn’t you know?
So it gives you a training jetpack to begin with. This doesn’t allow flight, only gliding and hovering, and so you spend a lot of time clinging to ledges and just about surviving. It’s all very interesting to look at, but not all that fun to play. Because most of it is quite hands-off. You press a button, your guy smashes a robot’s face in. You press a button, he flies from one piece of cover to the next.
UP OR DOWN
Oh, yes, of course, the ‘vertical cover’. It’s a much-touted feature of the game, but the problem is it’s just like normal cover, except you can’t run from one bit to the next, and instead have to fly there. Except it’s not really flying, and more pressing a button to teleport there with a fancy animation. Perhaps I’m being cynical, but this wasn’t what I signed up for when I asked for a game with a jetpack.
It does let you use one, eventually, to its full potential, and it is satisfying to zoom around and take out flying saucers with the mounted guns, but the handling is shockingly 
unresponsive at best.
Perhaps this is down to Airtight Games trying to make a cover-shooter and a flight sim all in one game; in the end both of them suffer, and just about pull off mediocre. It doesn’t help that the length of the game takes the biggest hit.
With only a single-player campaign to offer, there’s far too little here to satisfy. Maybe more could have been made of the World War 2 link. Apparently lizardmen did it. Who knew?
In the end, Dark Void is a mess of unrealised potential. Perhaps if the jetpack had worked like we all imagine jetpacks work, it would have been brilliant. But it’s not. By Phill Cameron
5/10
