Dark Void

Okay, so the standfirst oversold it – Dark Void won’t change your perceptions of reality. What it will do, however, is change your view of how the cover system works, the staple of modern gaming that has gone from idiot-pleaser in Gears Of War to game-ruiner in Resident Evil 5. The meat of all our Dark Void previews has pretty much covered this very thing, we should guiltily admit, but the problem is that this sounds pretty damn boring on paper. Well, in actuality, vertical cover has a lot to offer the third-person genre. Hanging on to the ends of surfaces and shooting enemies from above and below you is more interesting than you’d realise.

Then again, you regular readers of X360 have been told this a thousand times. Instead, having played the game from the beginning, we’ll divulge something a little less well-known about Dark Void: from what we’ve played, this third-person shooter threatens to be the most interesting of its kind for rather a long time. Though we can’t help but fear it’ll go the commercial dead-end route of Capcom’s other Western-developed effort, the divisive-but-actually-awesome Bionic Commando, it proposes enough new ideas to earn a place in the spotlight when January comes along. That is, of course, if it’s even possible to get the spotlight in a January release window.

First of all, the premise is rather out there. A plane containing an explorer, Will, and his old flame, goes down near the mythical Bermuda Triangle, transporting them to an alternate reality of Geth-looking creatures known as the Watchers. While the scripting and production values of the cut-scenes aren’t particularly impressive, something that really drew us towards Dark Void was that feeling that we were never entirely sure of what was going on around us; there’s something unsettling about the style of enemy and lack of clarification as to what has happened to the main characters. Clearly, this is a long, intriguing story that’ll need a lot of hours to burn towards its full potential.

Still, we could sit here all day and pretend that the story is the greatest draw of Dark Void, but, to be quite frank, a gigantic slice of the game’s appeal lies in the music. The first hour or so of our Dark Void preview was typical shooter fare, but the African percussion-styled soundtrack from Battlestar Galactica composer Bear McCreary ¬– he crafted a mean version of Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower, which we implore you to check out –¬¬¬¬ turned the game into a high-stakes fever dream. It’s such a change from the usual boring, movie-imitating orchestra of comparable action games, and, for viewers of Battlestar, is further affirmation that he’ll eventually become the John Williams of his generation. We can’t wait to hear the whole soundtrack, a rarity when it comes to videogames that don’t have the words ‘Metal Gear’ or ‘Final Fantasy’ in the title.

Eventually, the game just about catches up with the music, providing level design that cashes in on the vertical cover concept. When a fictionalised Nikola Tesla gives you a jetpack, Dark Void brings on a rather fantastic set piece that makes decent use of it: the USS Cyclops, a naval ship that went missing in real life, wedged on the side of a cliff. The mission is to ascend it, while fighting off the Watchers, entirely in vertical cover. When it comes to readjusting to the normal cover system, you momentarily forget whether you’re looking down at the enemy horizontally or vertically. The effect is dizzying and entirely welcome.

The only real issue is Dark Void’s all-round ugliness and slightly lazy art direction. In the first few hours, we saw little of any visual note besides the Cyclops, although a brief glimpse of the later levels, populated by UFOs and heavy on air combat, promised a lot more on this front. Dark Void is raw potential at the moment, but we’d say, from what we’ve played so far, that it’s still important to keep an eye on it. The last thing we – and Capcom – want is for it to slip under the radar, like Bionic Commando did this year. Dark Void may yet deserve a better fate.