Pixelnauts.net

If the idea of deftly weaving your jet pack in between enemy aircraft like a motorcycle through gridlocked traffic, diving towards the earth at break-neck speeds and rescuing a falling friend just moments before she crashes into the ground, or latching on to the side of a lumbering battleship, tossing a grenade into shaft of its massive gun, then kicking off back into the sky before they even knew what hit them all sounds like one heck of an entertaining time, then Dark Void is not the game for you.

It isn't that the team at AirTight Games tried to capture this kind of excitement and failed, that would at least be understandable. Instead, Dark Void fails on its own terms. Clearly AirTight set out to craft a thrilling 'Rocketeer-with-aliens' adventure, but seemed to miss what makes the fantasy of a jet pack so alluring. With the exception of being able to hover for a short period of time over your enemies during ground combat, there isn't a single element of the game play that couldn't be accomplished just as easily with an airplane.

Sadly, this missed opportunity only scratches the surface of this game's problems.

Dark Void's story fluctuates between being promising one moment to utterly absurd the next so greatly that it's never able to find its footing. By the game's end there are so many plot holes and unresolved story arcs that it almost seems like the writers never finished brainstorming before they started throwing everything in. On the one hand, it's hilarious in a Plan 9 from Outer Space kinda way, but on the other hand, that movie works because it's not ten hours long.

You play the role of Will Grey, a pilot who, when flying through the Bermuda Triangle in 1938, gets sucked into another dimension populated by an evil all-knowing race of insectoids called The Watchers. The role of Will is voiced predictably by Uncharted's Nolan North who, incidentally, is moving down the road of typecasting with greater determination than Michael Cera. Of course, Will learns that the Watchers have been manipulating human society for thousands of years plotting the perfect moment for them to pass through the portal and enslave humanity, so it's up to him and his jet pack to make sure that that doesn't happen.

Throughout your adventure you'll encounter everything including, but not limited to, a human resistance led by  super-humans called adepts, though what differentiates them from everyone else is entirely unclear; a giant monster called 'The Collector,' which everyone seems to know about except for you; a child oracle with supernatural visions of the future (why are they always children?); inventor Nikola Tesla, because, hey, why not?; and a three-headed dragon, yes, a dragon. Eat your heart out Ed Wood.

All of this could be possibly be forgiven (or at least made somewhat tolerable) if AirTight would've just made zipping around in a jet pack fun. Alas, it wasn't meant to be. The game's action is split into two segments: ground, cover-based combat and aerial dogfights. The former is derivative of just about every other shooter you've ever played. The latter, which should be the game's bread-and-butter, is even less exciting.