This is an archive review, from the olden days of The Game Show. Enjoy!
Digital Extremes finally release their third-person action/horror shooter, nearly four years in the making. The result is a choppy, repetitive and frankly tedious effort that’s more derivative than it is definitive.
Dark Sector’s hero is a shadowy, amoral CIA operative named Hayden Tenno, sent into the fictional soviet state of Lasria on a wet-ops trip to assassinate Robert Mezner; a cruel scientist with obscure plans for a utopian new-world-order and a killer virus, with which he intends to realise his aspiration. The opening act establishes that Mezner’s virus is in fact a complex biological agent used to transform regular people into The Walking Dead. If this wasn’t clichéd enough, Digital Extremes even went to the trouble of developing different iterations of the virus for turning people into large lumbering beasts or agile, wall-crawling lickers respectively. In a surely-inspired move of banality, there are even mutated dog versions of the infected populace. Leon Hayden is sent in behind enemy lines to stop the spread of the virus and save the world from the threat of zombie biological warfare. The narrative in Dark Sector is bland, unimaginative and lacks any real explanation. Hayden arrives in Lasria and protests about not liking his job whilst Dark Sector’s version of Colonel Campbell barks orders at him. The player meets an old man in the opening act who is supposedly connected to the story as well as a female character with links to this Mezner character. Neither character has any real substance and any relationship they have to the bigger picture is not clearly elucidated. There are some allusions at Hayden’s shady past in the voice acting but it’s too vague so offers naught to the actual atmosphere. Mezner appears throughout the story with almost comic regularity and by the time the game ends he feels like a genuine joke. I can’t honestly tell you what the story’s about because it’s presented in so lacklustre a way that I couldn’t care either way. Pretty decent voice acting with the talents of Michael Rosenbaum and the exceptional Jürgen Prochnow make the cutscenes bearable, if excruciatingly unexciting.
Before too long, Hayden expectedly gets himself infected with a powerful variety of the very same virus, turning his left arm into a putrid mess for a short while, before the infection mutates his arm into a bio-metal super-limb that affords our protagonist a range of unique abilities with each one unlocked at various stages throughout the narrative. None of the abilities are as instantly recognisable however as The Glaive; the cover artwork features this iconic, three-pronged projectile so it’s with a certain relief that it’s the first ability you acquire. Anyone who’s seen Krull will be more than familiar with a Glaive: it’s a bladed thrown weapon and much like a boomerang returns to its pitcher’s hand after being hurled. If you’ve played Painkiller then you know what to expect.
As the gamer progresses through Dark Sector, the glaive takes centre-stage. Beheading enemies, opening doors and charging the glaive with elemental powers is just the beginning. Unlocking special abilities like the charged shot is enjoyable; hold down the throw button with correct timing and Hayden lobs his jagged Frisbee with enough force to slice a man in twain. You can also dual-wield the glaive with a handgun which doubles the variety of attacks. Firing at a pocket of guards whilst tagging multiple enemies with the glaive and dispatching them all within a short period of time always feels nice, but frankly the gunplay is dull and the glaive is endlessly repetitive; Hayden can only carry two guns for a start. Whilst this might be realistic, the game is about a man with a metal zombie arm and a giant magic shuriken – I don’t think anyone would have a problem with the suspension of disbelief. On show is your usual fair of assault rifle, shotgun, .44 revolver and machine pistol and all can be upgraded on the black market using the vast and frankly ridiculous amount of cash Hayden finds lying around in Mafioso suitcases. If I found the same amount of folding money just kicking about I would have paid my mortgage three times over by now, which really showcases the prices that the black market weapons sellers demand. The guns feels solid and the impact is just about convincing enough even on the higher levels, but the game is plagued with the opinion that rank and file troops will happily sustain head trauma from three or more 9mm rounds and will even continue to attack, rendering the guns pretty otiose. This is a personal bugbear of mine and is prevalent in Dark Sector, to the point where the use of guns is vastly overshadowed by the power of the glaive.
Once the player has unlocked the aftertouch ability then the game really slows in pace. Aftertouch gives the player the ability to control the glaive in mid-air, whilst the game goes into a bullet-time slow motion mode. As this is the most accurate way to use the glaive, many players will find that levels all take about three times too long to get through due to the heavy excess of slow-motion. Being able to stack abilities is quite fun; an aftertouched power attack is an entertaining way to watch a decapitation in grisly detail. Controlling the glaive mid-air to imbue with fire, then arcing the blade into a mutant dog is entertaining enough but after five or six hours this reviewer was frightfully bored of throwing things at bad guys. Gameplay is mixed up by adding in insta-kill finishing moves but it’s too little to add variety to the otherwise bland combat, not to mention the fact that a mêlée finisher is quite hard to execute during a firefight with fifteen soldiers. In fact, mêlée full stop is a very rebarbative experience in Dark Sector; wildly swinging the glaive even at the weakest zombie enemies needs at least two hits to finish them off and is a boring, dull affair. Plenty of games in this ilk have a swift, brutal-feeling combat system but Dark Sector really feels like a game about throwing a Frisbee, with every other consideration bolted quickly -and cheaply- on the outside.
Take the level progression for example. The Legend of Zelda games have the perfect way of giving you a shiny new gadget in each dungeon, quickly followed by a boss fight which allows free reign to try out your new toy. As the game progresses the challenge is in recognising the hallmarks of each item or ability and solving combination puzzles that utilise them. Dark Sector seems to just throw new things at you as a way of leading through an otherwise horrid experience. Without the glaive and abilities, Dark Sector would be a clunkier version of Gears of War with an emo protagonist. Even by dangling the proverbial carrot in front of the player’s face, this game struggles to remain engaging all the way through the story. Within about three hours players will have had their fill – after that point the game offers nothing – and if you want to play a game that’s hours of endlessly hurling a glaive at enemies you may as well play Krull on the Atari 2600. And the noise! The incessant woop-woop-woop of the glaive after being thrown is enough to try a saint’s patience. Had the sound designers had the foresight to think “The gamer is likely to fling this weapon a million times, perhaps we should have a dozen or so sound variants, you know, to stop the sound becoming stale?” But no. One sound. A sound that will honestly have you playing the game on mute it’s that irritating.
Level design is riddled with invidious trigger events. Going through this door makes bad guys appear. Crossing this bridge releases infinite zombies (another bad idea). It’s the kind of game design that was fine for the PlayStation but it’s 2008 now – surely we can think of something new? Another lack of consideration is the inclusion of the oh-so-popular quick time event. I hate QTEs; they lack imagination and I consider them a plague on modern games design. A QTE is a cutscene that you’re unable to watch because you’re looking out for “Press X” or “Tap Y”. The difficulty curve is essentially a case of introducing bigger, stronger enemies as the game progresses (another bugbear of mine) or souped-up, shin versions of previous enemies. Multiplayer is terrible and is hardly worth mentioning. Like everything else it was most likely tagged on at the end and is unimaginative to a fault.
Graphically the game is impressive in a few areas but the majority of the visuals are grey and bland. The glowing neon blood spurted from your mutated adversaries and the environmental effects are nice, nonetheless the game is too dark, too generic and lacking in detail. The world feels less of a well-realised environment and more of a rushed pantomime set. There are only so many ruined buildings in the rain or underground facilities that one gamer can stand, especially with the extreme lack of detail in the textures. There’s also a real fondness for specular, shiny surfaces. This is a terrible and cheap way to showcase normal mapping and surface detail and it’s horrible to the eye too. Hayden’s hair looks more like a varnished countertop than actual hair.
Overall, it seems the essential quality of Dark Sector is that you get to play an awkward halfway house between Resident Evil 4, Painkiller and Gears of War – but one which is nowhere near as well-accomplished as either. Yes it’s a fun game – cutting soldiers in half is fun, setting dogs on fire is fun, shotgunning zombies is fun. Even the bits where you get to drive the awfully-controlled walker is fun. Ultimately though, Dark Sector does not deliver enough to lift it from the underachieving generic shooter mould from which is it cast. The levels are all too similar, the visuals are muddy and the story is frail and indifferent. I found myself playing this game just to get through it, and that’s never how a video game should be.