Airtight Games and Capcom are taking a huge risk making a game that revolves around Aerial Combat. We all know how the Superman series has worked out. On the flip side, there are many games that do get flying right. We hope Dark Void is going to be one of the latter.

The demo started us out with a quick cutscene that provided absolutely no background to the story minus how the protagonist finds his ubiquitous rocket pack. For those that want the background, here’s the quick and dirty: You play as William Grey, a pilot who crash lands in the Bermuda Triangle that teleports him to a parallel universe where a maleficent alien race known as the Watchers has invaded Earth. You don’t plan on allowing that.

Coming from one who has played very little of flying games in the past, I was considerably cautious in my approach to the demo. While I love platformers, I also love “up” always being “up” and “down” always being “down”. The demo quickly informed me via trial by fire that this isn’t always the case. While I indeed crashed and burned into the rocky mountainside more than once, in a couple minutes I had a bit of a grip on the controls. They are surprisingly intuitive, like it felt right to fly this way, and upon closer inspection the developers have gone to great lengths to accomplish this.

While you have little-to-no control shortly after takeoff as Grey is still recovering from the initial rocket boost, afterwards is much easier. The left joystick controls which direction you go along fairly familiar axes. You basically live or die by this joystick. The right joystick controls yaw, which affects which direction is your arbitrary “up”. You basically just die by this joystick (although more experienced fliers will find it extremely useful for performing any sort of useful flying maneuver).

Additionally, your character will subtly roll back into the traditional “up” and “down” when you’re not turning as a way to level out. On top of this, a handy radar is provided that tells you where enemies and whether they’re above or below you, and if that isn’t enough you can hit the left bumper (Xbox 360) to lock the camera on the nearest enemy. Clicking in the right thumbstick and moving it in tandem with the left allows you to perform basic barrel rolls and U-turns to avoid incoming fire.

The graphics are provided Unreal technology, so they are unsurprisingly adequate. They could stand to be more detailed, but as most of the demo revolved around flying around, most everything is motion-blurred anyway.

If there’s any glaringly obvious problem with the demo, it’s with enemy AI. While the A.I. is pretty good when it’s near you, enemies can be wildly inaccurate from even a moderate distance, and don’t seem to recognize all barriers to their gunfire. One enemy Watcher was even shooting at us although it was underneath the hard steel surface on another floor. Another Watcher was relentless firing at us from behind cover without correcting its aim to avoid the cover, giving us easy pickings at its head.

The most fun we had was when we hi-jacked an enemy ship. That is, we landed on it, maneuvered our way around the ship to avoid its gunfire, and pried off some assumedly important control panel before the enemy inside came out and battled us. After it was vanquished, we hopped in the pilot’s chair and proceeded to mop up. We hope you’ll be able to do this with other vehicles throughout the story.

Another thing we got a taste of was weaponry. While you start with a standard machine gun, you can pick up alien guns like a plasma rifle and rocket launcher of sorts. As we’re dealing with Alien weapons here, the developers have a chance to show off how creative they can be. Finally, there’s a skeleton of a cover system that allows Grey to crouch behind boxes and walls, and lean against door entrances. It generally gets the job done, although movement from cover to cover could certainly be improved via something like the rodeo run in Gears of War.

Overall, Dark Void appears to be a game we might actually enjoy when it releases its full version on the 360, PS3 and PC this January 19th. The flying controls are tight and easy-to-learn, and while the story appears to be trite the combat is promising. We do hope some of the AI problems are mopped up in the final build, but overall Dark Void shows promise.

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About This Author: Andrew Giese

I spend more time reading and writing about gaming, but when I do get a chance to grab the sticks, you bet I'll be unavailable for the next few hours. I hope to complete my Masters in Computer Science in a few years and one day actually help make some of the games I love.

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