Xbox 360
The first thing that’s unlikeable about the Dark Void demo (available on PSN and XBLA now) is that the UI text is huge, but also thin enough in places it’s hard to read despite its size: You get the impression the demo is chapter 6 of episode 1, but you can’t be sure when the lettering of “Chapter” is thin enough to be non-existent on a 47-inch TV.
Pushing the “Start Demo” button opens with a cut-scene showing yet another protagonist voiced by Nolan North, who we heard in Shadow Complex, Uncharted 2 and Assassin’s Creed II last year. Not to mention his upcoming appearance in Alpha Protocol.
Another thing you’ll notice here are over-sized eyes and exaggerated movements. These are cut-scenes designed to be a caricature of realism, rather than realistic. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but hand-animated cuts can feel cheap given how used to motion capture we’ve all become.
As soon as you start playing you’re running along with the jetpack from the cut-scene strapped to your back. Running to a cliffs edge, you’re told to push Triangle twice to get flying. What’s nice here is how Will leans into the flying and how you can see his right hand operate the brake and boost accordingly. His body is suitably floppy and panicked by take-off too.
Once you’ve got the hang of that, the game effectively has you shoot three fish in barrels, being three static and defenceless targets as they are. Doing so, however, triggers the arrival of three UFO’s.
It’s these that allow for the UFO-jacking seen in gameplay videos of the game to date. You just have to get close-ish and press Circle, then it’s holding Circle to prise off the panel that keeps the cockpit closed, all the while dodging the pilots attempts to shoot or shake you off. Success means getting to fight the pilot for its gun, shooting its head off and assuming control of the vehicle. Which, as it happens, controls just like your jetpack. Only with bigger guns. Bigger guns are good.
So now we’ve done flying and UFO-jacking, you can’t help but feel it’s time for an interior section. And that’s exactly what we get. It plays pretty much like Uncharted at this point, only your entering cover with Square and reloading with R2. Leaving triggers a cut-scene and the end of the demo.
This seems like the right point to talk about how the graphics were. Serviceable is generally the best word for them. There are some nice touches; the water being brought up by your flying close to it, also putting droplets of water on the screen as if hitting the camera. Objects, including you, interrupt the streams of light from the sun. However, the demo never looks spectacular, but that could be due to the level. There’s physically not much in it.
There are screenshots of jungles, ruins and other varied environments out there. And let’s not forget that Nikola Tesla is your Q, much as we had Leonardo da Vinci play the part in Assassin’s Creed II.
From the demo it’s difficult to be overly impressed, but it’s also quite unfair to write off the potential of Dark Void.
We shall see.