19 people review one game at the same time: 28 May 2010 onward

[blueball]

Some more bugs I have found:

When you start at a saved point you can choose your weapons. If you die and it restarts you at that part of the level again you don't get to choose your weapons and it doesn't remember what you did choose so you have the wrong weapons for the mission every time unless you quit and restart the level!!!!!

If you are standing on a ledge and you start the rocket pack it goes in the direction of the mouse cursor, not where the aiming reticle is. As you cannot see the mouse cursor you shoot off in some random and unexpected direction. I discovered this after nose diving into the ground twice in a row!!!!

[Apex]

Thanks go to Zak and HeXus for this.

Having no idea what Zak had planed for us vic... volunteers; it was a pleasant shock that Dark Void dropped onto my mat on Friday.

My style of game play is first person shooters (think COD / BF ect) real time strategy (C&C / DOW ect ect) and some random puzzle games.

Specs for the machine used can be found in my profile.

Below is my own opinion on this game.

The Good

100 words for the good….. this is going to be harder then I thought.

The one thing that grabbed me the most about this was the music, looking into it and I found that it was done by the same person that did the score for Battle Star Galactic; which explained the feeling of “I have been here before / heard that before”

The ability to upgrade the weapons through a simple interface is a nice touch; no arsing about with long winded menus.

The controls for fighting when vertical are simple enough and add a twist to the game even if it does not bring anything thing new to the field.

The graphics while nothing earth shattering are crisp enough.

Sorry, seems I’ve run out of nice things to say about this….

The Bad

The controls, dear god what planet where the designers on…. O wait; this is a console port so what do you expect?

The first level vexed me for at least 9 try’s till I figured out that upping the mouse sensitive allowed me to actually fly and aim.

The main menus have no sound feed back and are presented at an angle which gives you a slightly uneasy feeling.

The voice acting was wooden and had no emotion to it; the characters didn’t make me want to know more about them.

There was times when the voice was out of sync with the animation on the screen so it was like a dodgy 70’s Kung-Fu movie with bad dubbing.

Random slowdowns with some of the cut scenes then rest of the time it was fine, this points to an unfinished port…..

Random other graphical glitches I don’t have this issue with other games e.g. MW2 ect.

The Ugly

One word “Securom”. I hate it with a passion; it is the bane of my life and forces me to make a choice that I would rather not have to.

When installing there was no mention that it was installing Securom and no mention that it activated it’s self, this is just wrong and quiet frankly am annoyed that there is no warning on the box that I can find or in the install.

The install was taking way too long, so to beat it I had to copy the disk to the hard drive and install from there, in this day and age we should not be forced to do this to get a game to install.

Random crash to desktop when it felt like it…. No idea why and frankly don’t care has the game has no replay value in it.

The save point system, Jesus Christ what where they on when they came up with what they did, it’s already been coved by others so I don’t feel the need to cover it again but I will briefly say it’s retarded.

Conclusion

Decent enough game and there are no real deal killers just a load of niggles that sadly detract from the game and what they where trying to achieve.

I did actually enjoy the game even if it seemed I didn’t.

The game is not finished imho, it needed a few more months development time and it might have finished off being a decent game.

Would I recommend it? Sadly no, which is a shame; it’s not even worthy of the bargain basement.

[Zak33]

very good so far people.. realy excellent

I'm out al week now, but will pop in when I get a chance...

I'm interested to know if anyone is stuck on ay hard bits and if anyone who's finished can help?

[Spud1]

hehe zak it's a Mac Pro, when I bought it 2.5 years ago it was the best value pc on the market..get rid of macOS and you have a top spec gaming PC

There were a few tricky points in the game (despite it being too easy on the whole) - largely some of the specific "set pieces" and the first time you did some flying/shooting - but generally getting past those bits was just a case of try it a couple of times, figure out the weak point of said boss through trial and error..have now finished the game though so if anyone does need help..shout up!

I'll add to my review by confirming that after going through the whole thing, I didn't experience any bugs other than installing; no crashes, errors, falling through the floor etc..odd really considering the number of people with issues! I think it would be interesting if everyone else who reviewed could also post their system specs so we can see if there is any common bit of hardware causing the faults? (eg graphics, cpu etc).

[Lee H]

Installation.

Oh what a pain this game was to install. It started installing very, very slowly, and after 10 minutes of the drive constantly ramping up and down read speed, it decided to dive out and crash back to the desktop without any notification or feedback at all. After experiencing similar issues in the past, I kind of knew what to do here, so I proceeded to remove the disc from the optical drive, give it a quick clean/wipe off and placed back into the optical drive and eventually start the installation process completely. This actually took a while so while the optical drive was making sweet music, I grabbed a quick brew and sat awaiting completion.

Graphics.

Ah... here we go, onto the graphics. The graphics for this game are like the general run-of-the-mill sci-fi type usually reserved for space combat sims. Most of it is dark and moody as it feels like it's trying to influence the mood of the gameplay in some way. Occasionally the grey 'doom' is broken and interupted either by some lighting effects from some of the energy-based weapons, or by some rather nice solar/lunar background. Other than that the graphics are okay but there was a few sections I had to adjust the brightness to actually see in some of the darker levels. As for the options in regards to the graphics, there is not that much to report that can be adjusted apart from resolution, v-synch, and a few other options which can be adjusted if your PC is not up to the task of rendering everything at the highest quality and detail. It appears that there are not many graphical options to adjust which points towards this being a good port of a console game onto PC.

Sounds & Audio.

Sound in this game is generally very good. You get the usual plethora of noises you would expect from a FPS style game with a few grunts and the odd bit of speech thrown in for good measure. The musical score for this game is very good indeed with a wide range of scores available which also feel like they are trying to influence the mood. After a while it does feel like they've tried to make everything on the game affect the music, with the orchestral score kicking in every couple of minutes, you'd expect that later on, the music will go " dum-dum-derrrr" at the opening of an envelope. Another thing I sort of picked up on was that the voices spoken didn't sometimes reflect what was happening on screen. Rather than having some sort of emotional feedback in their voices, they just seemed to be spoken from a script, recorded and then used within the game at a later date. It's a good job that the cut-scenes could be bypassed by pressing enter to skip them.

Gameplay.

And here we are... to the most important part of the game - GAMEPLAY. This game has a good level of gameplay, but it has been let down by a few little flaws.

I've noticed that clipping on the maps is not that good and several times throughout playing this over the weekend, I had to reload from the last save position as I was stuck between a wall and the floor, or the floor and something invisible that could not be jumped, or rocket-packed over. Another thing to report is the AI of the opposition and this has a few niggles as you can move to certain parts of maps, hide but still be in visible view to the enemy, who do nothing at all when shot at until you breach a certain part of the map where they all of a sudden know your there and respond accordingly. Control-wise, it appears that this game does have a few shortcomings. Many times I've had the character lock up shooting out a full magazine when all I've wanted was a few controlled bursts to take off a few heads with a nicely placed headshot or two. Trying to narrow down any issues, I resorted to plugging in the xbox 360 wired controller and this worked fine and just made the game feel the same as the xbox version and did not improve or make the gameplay any worse overall, it just allowed those who are more used to using the consoles controller to play the game how they want to play it. Another thing I have noticed is that this game does actually keep you wanting to play it more and more to get passed the part your struggling on. A few times over the weekend, I shut the game down after getting to a point I couldn't pass, only to go back 20 mins later, get passed the part I was having issues with and carry on for a few more levels.


Overall, dark void is not a bad game, but it does have a few areas which could have been polished a little more to make this into an excellent game. If I had to mark this out of 10, I would say around 7/10 as it's good, but nothing special compared to some other titles that are available

[Carlh]

Installation Notes
No problems were encounted during the installation, the whole process was quite pain free and took around 15 minutes.


The game is quite a good mix of adventure, sci fi and mainly a first person shooter, however it isnt without its downfalls, for example the first level where your testing the flying prototype out seems to me to be quite a lazy console port and the controls with the mouse are quite frustrating to say the least.

After, although the game is quite slow to get going it does improve as the levels do get a little more challenging , however throughout the game with the menus and the on screen help system which pops up from time to time it does appears as though this is a port from the xbox version and this can show from time to time.

The graphics are very good as well as the interaction between the characters throughout the story line, especially the dialogue between the main characters throughout.

The enemy UI mostly droids throughout the game seems very lacklustre and the only challenge really instead of them hiding for cover (regardless of difficulty setting) is really just down to the vast quanity of them that can appear from any one time usually just appearing from one area and shooting in your general direcion without any thought of ducking for cover should you fire back.

There are also a few glitches which I have noticed in the period I have played it where you would get stuck for no apparent reason.

Dark Void could have been a good game - and this shows with the dialogue with the main characters throughout the game, the graphics in parts, soundtrack as well as cut scenes however as it can come quite repetitive quickly most gamers could be put off by this.

Another point that I would state is that this game could have been so much better, even by simple additions of a online mode - after all it is based on the unreal engine, however for some reason Capcom decided not to add this to the game.

Overall I would give this a 6.5/10

[GheeTsar]

Dark Void Impressions.

First and foremost – huge thanks to both Zak33 and Hexus for this great opportunity. What a fantastic idea – hope you can repeat it again. I’ve now finished the game, so here are my thoughts on it:

In short, I liked, but did not love this game. With some more time/budget/polishing it could have been excellent but as it is it feels part baked.

Things I really liked:

• The game’s ambition – some really good ideas amongst the rehashed fodder that makes up the rest of the game
• The vertical sections – loved these and I almost got vertigo!
• Frantic battles using the jetpack. At first I played this game like a Gears of War/Mass Effect game, but soon found it was much more fun to use the jet pack to leap/fly over the battle and rain destruction from above.
• A very good musical score – much better than most games
• The final boss looks great (if very easy to beat)
• Hijacking spacecraft!

Things I quite liked:

• I liked being able to upgrade weapons, which were pretty good fun to use anyway.
• The graphics were good in places, especially some of the jetpack levels
• The game gets better as it goes on and I enjoyed using the jetpack once I got the hang of it.
• Some of the watcher animation was pretty good
• Good feeling of scale – some environments felt huge
• Some humour included – there are nods to Star Wars and Back to the Future

Things that could have been better:

• Characters – voice acting was largely sub par (although not dire) and some of the models were poor (eg: Nikola) and the animation was not up to modern standards. For me it was a trip to the uncanny valley.
• Plot – third rate and clichéd mostly, some bits ok though
• Not enough polish/bug testing (eg: lacklustre menu, some clipping issues)
• Collect-em-up journals did not offer enough reward for the effort of hunting for them
• Mouse/keyboard controls took a bit of getting used to in the air, but worked sufficiently well after practice.
• AI – pretty basic and it didn’t really put up much of fight
• Could have made for an excellent multiplayer – but none provided.

Things I really did not like:

• Installation – in short it took five install attempts to get this working and much frustration
• Crashing – a further hour was wasted trying to resolve framerate stuttering and crashing during cutscenes (this was successful in the end). Later it completely locked up my machine requiring a hard reset while I was paused to go to the loo
• It’s too short – the game took just over 5 hours to complete - not what I’d expect from a full price title. It’s pretty easy on normal too – which doesn’t help the playtime issue.
• Sniper rifle aiming – nearly impossible for some reason

Conclusion

Once you’ve got through the opening stages it does offer some really good, if short-lived and unpolished, fun. If there were no installation/crashing issues I’d give it 7/10 but as it is I think 6/10 is more appropriate.

If this game gets reduced to budget and the crashing can be resolved with a patch, I reckon it would be worth considering.

[Steven W]

Great reviews. I hope we can do this again. Zak did a cracking job at organising this and big kudos to all for reviewing the game so quickly and with such style.

You're all on the front page! I'll add any remaining ones when arrive.

http://gaming.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=24893

[kopite]

I havent had chance to play it for long but I have a few thoughts already.

The controls at the first flying bit feels like you are flying through tracle. It might get better but it seemed really awckward.

As standard having y inverted is annoying. The majority of games are usually the other way around as standard so it seems weird.

The game so far does seem ok though. Voice acting is a bit crappy and the continual repeating of the same phrases is a bit jarring.

[Iron Sights]

As standard having y inverted is annoying. The majority of games are usually the other way around as standard so it seems weird.

Yeah I know what you mean about the controls but just to let you know it can be changed in the options

[Apex]

Opinion posted

[kopite]

Yeah I know what you mean about the controls but just to let you know it can be changed in the options

Yeah I`ve changed them

It just seems strange that they`d go against the norm of every FPS since quake.`

[blueball]

very good so far people.. realy excellent

I'm out al week now, but will pop in when I get a chance...

I'm interested to know if anyone is stuck on ay hard bits and if anyone who's finished can help?

I got stuck/frustrated at the bit where you have to defend the ark as it takes off. I keep dying before killing the 3 machines; sometimes I am shooting away, the arks health is fine and so is mione then BAM, cut screen and I failed again!

I'll keep trying, I hate being beaten.

[Terbinator]

Yeah I`ve changed them

It just seems strange that they`d go against the norm of every FPS since quake.`

This is why i like the 360 - Defaults to inverted for me every time

[jim]

Great reviews. I hope we can do this again. Zak did a cracking job at organising this and big kudos to all for reviewing the game so quickly and with such style.

You're all on the front page! I'll add any remaining ones when arrive.

http://gaming.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=24893

Nice one Steven, looks good!

[kopite]

Right FInally played it enough to give my views.

The Good,

The alternate reality thing is a nice idea And it quite well implemented. The robots are great although I havent got far enough into it to make a final decision but alternate world so far gets a thumbs up from me.

SOme of the tech the designers came up with for the world is nice too. Weapons are pretty well realised.

SOund effects and music are good.

IT was free

Erm The environments at least from the part of the game I`ve played are quite nice.

Did I mention it was free.

Hmm SOrry thats about all I can find.


THe Bad.

The graphics are dated. I know its a console port but we had better graphics with far cry and this just looks like nothing has moved on. The foliage doesnt move when you walk throgh it which I have got used to in games now.

THe voice acting is pretty bad and phrases seem very stilted. after a few minutes in the initial fight I felt I started to hear repeats of the main characters phrases.

The controls are annoying. WHy is it that everyother game can have the y axis inversion off as standard but this decides that they know better.

The cover system is annoying. I dont mind having to press a button to get into cover but having to press the same button to get out of cover seems daft. WHy cant I press jump to jump out of scenery.

The AI seems really dumb WHy stand out in front of me when I`m shooting. Why hide behind the same bit of scenery and not try to flank me. I thought AI had moved on in the past few years

Opinion.

Overall its not a bad game. I have played much worse games and seen much worse graphics but it just seems like they had a great idea and didnt follow it through as well as they could.

I`d give it 6/10