Dark Void follows the story of Will Grey, a pilot, with his old flame, Ava. The year is 1938 and they are flying over the Bermuda triangle when they are suddenly sucked into 'the void', a parallel universe where they encounter another race called the Watchers and other human beings. The Watchers are making humans do their bidding and treat them as gods. You eventually meet the resistance and fight against the watchers to save the remaining humans and also to escape back to your own world.
Despite the ten hours that it takes to complete the game - I found it hard to be captivated by the storyline and hardly kept me at the edge of my seat.
After brief shooting sections Will encounters Nikola Tesla and he gives him a jet pack that you can use in combat to shoot down enemies while flying and use the guns on your jet pack in dog fights in the sky. The dog fights are the best parts and reflect the studio's past work on Crimson Skies, this in shown off not just in the tight controls but the game play mechanic as a whole. Jet packs aside, the game is another third person cover based shooter that fails to do much different or fun from the norm. Before Dark Void was released the game was hyped a lot for its 'vertical cover' that is basically shooting up the side of a building, it's not very fun. The game only has 6 guns and they can be upgraded twice for more bullets and more damage. There are about 2 or 3 bigger guns towards the end but the main human and alien assault rifles you get at the beginning are the best to use throughout the whole game.
The music in dark void is its strongest point; the game has one main theme, which is manipulated in several ways for different situations that are put to great use. The voice acting is great as well including the voice of Will, voiced by Noland North.
The worst point and the main reason why Dark Void suffers is because of technical issues. Textures can pop in after an abnormally long time and in an instance it popped in and then out again and in again until the cut scene ended. Issues with the voice tracks would be non existent in a cut scene,so I had to put subtitles on and there was instances of severe frame rate issues. A lot of other games have difficulties on a technical level but this game has so many issues that it ruined my experience.
Overall Dark Void has a lot of ideas but it is ruined by technical difficulties and with only a 10 hour experience with no replay value I find it hard to recommend this game to anyone.
