G4TV

Dark Sector is a game that has frustrated me ever since I finished playing it.  It clearly evokes Gears of War in its cover-based combat and exceptional technical skill in the graphics as well as emulating the “destroyed beauty” aesthetic of that seminal game. The game also employs more boss battles than Gears, the use of a unique weapon, and elemental upgrades. These elements add up to a game, that while derivative, should be able to satisfy your action game fix.  Well they don’t. Dark Sector is by far, the most tedious game I have played so far this year.

Dark Elements

The game has you play Hayden Tenno, a secret agent/operative/assassin who goes to a fictional Soviet country to stop a madman with a virus.  Things don’t work out so well and you get infected with said virus, which provides you with newfound powers and a Krull-like blade called a Glaive.  You have to stop the madman, and see if you can be cured of the infection.  The conceit of the game is that you are an antihero who might have found his path due to the virus that seems to deform everyone else’s moral compass.  This might sound intriguing, but the storytelling is so abominable that I really don’t know what truly happened in the game.  The game stops down for cut scenes so intermittently that I couldn’t remember what happened before and if certain characters had already been introduced. In the end though, I couldn’t care.  While games of this type aren’t expected to wow one with story, a good solid narrative framework helps motivate the player to keep going and see what’s around that next corner, a nice complement to the gameplay.

Assuming the gameplay is worth you attention.

Copy from the Best

As I mentioned, Dark Sector emulated Gears in its cover-based combat.  Apparently Laskia, the Soviet satellite you run around in, was the chief supplier of crates and concrete barriers to the Kremlin, because they’re everywhere.  Tapping A puts you behind your environmental shield….in theory, because A also has you perform a dodge roll.  The reliability of which action will occur at a given time is nonsensical and more than frequently you will somersault like an idiot in from of cover.  In fact, the game is riddled with spotty context-sensitive actions. Sometimes it’s not a big deal. Sometimes you’ll question if the game was playtested.

Really, those problems are the tip of the iceberg.  Combat has one salient aspect, the targeting is solid and you can hit what you’re supposed to hit.  This might be so apparent due to the appalling enemy A.I. that likes to find a spot behind cover and then just pop up on a regular schedule to get pummeled with bullets.  In fact on several occasions, I would drop a bad guy and then watch a new enemy come out and stand exactly where the dead body would be and start shooting.  The entire combat feels like nothing more than an advanced whack-a-mole and becomes mind-numbingly tedious with a couple of hours of play.   The same routine occurs every time - wipe out a wave of bad guys, a second wave shows up, then move on.

In fact, Dark Sector made me appreciate Gears more.  That game was all about close quarters combat which brought with it the tension of getting flanked and enemies that, while suicidally homicidal, were determined to bring you down even if they died.  Every combat set piece in that game was intense and memorable. Here, I couldn’t tell one from another.  I just sat behind a crate and put my reticule over polygons and pulled the trigger.

There are some human enemies and monsters that do run at you.  That’s all they really do…run at you.

Throw Away Ideas

Oh yeah, the Glaive.  This is the entire hook of the game and it doesn’t impress.  It’s slow and unsatisfying.  Ranged Glaive attacks rarely kill with one hit so you use your pistol in concert with it hitting enemies with the Glaive and shooting as you wait for it to travel back, like a boomerang. All this process does is slightly speed-up the interminable combat.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of this weapon is that, despite it being born of a virus, it is not an organic part of Tenno.  He actually has to pull it out as if it was a firearm and you can only use the relatively weak pistol in concert and not with any of the more powerful weapons in the game.  Switching back and forth between Glaive and more powerful guns is a slow and potentially life-threatening task.  This is one of numerous attempts at “balancing” throughout the game that will make you’re brain hurt when trying to justify their logic.  Another is that you cannot pick up and use enemy weapons for longer than a handful of seconds because they have been outfitted with something that senses you infection and causes them to explode. The end result is you can buy “black market” weapons and find ammo pick ups that jarringly litter the landscape.  Look, the guy has a virus that kind of turn his skin to metal…we’ve already advanced past “reality.” There has to be a better way to keep the game challenging, without becoming insipid.

The Glaive does acquire some new abilities. It can pick up fire, electricity and frost.  These can mostly help in combat but are primarily designed for puzzles that are so shameless rudimentary that they appear to have been cryogenically transported from 1998.  Later, you acquire the ability to guide the flight path of the Glaive in slow-motion. This can help with both combat and puzzles, but slows down the action to a standstill.  Some people will tell you this is endlessly fun. They are horribly wrong. In addition, these puzzles were frequently obscured by a lack of information or the games own graphics. For example, the electricity to open a lock in one section is trapped behind a seemingly-impenetrable steel cage, but the game is too dark for you to notice the opening in the middle of the cage.

Similar bad logic afflicts the numerous boss battles.  They too are rudimentary, but without any indication from the game about how to proceed like a small cut scene when you first damage the boss. I actually made life harder for myself because my brain wouldn’t accept the fact that what the game wanted me to do was so obvious.

Just a Pretty Face

The game isn’t fun at all - including the pathetically limited multiplayer options which aren’t worth going into. It’s just frustrating that Dark Sector, with all the trappings of a good game could squander nearly every single one of them with bad level design,  poor logic, repetitive combat, and no attention to what made its inspiration so…inspiring.  I will be haunted as to how this is the end result of many years of effort, but take it from me, you don’t need those ghosts.

Review by: Adam Sessler