Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s just some dude with Nolan North’s voice and a pretty swanky jetpack on his back. Despite not being internally developed at Capcom, Dark Void still manages to capture all the trademark Capcom silliness and from its man-versus-UFO dogfights to the frankly nonsensical plot, they don’t come much sillier than this. Stop us if you’ve heard this one – a courier pilot that sounds and acts strangely like Nathan Drake flies into the Bermuda Triangle and gets whisked away to alternate dimension The Void, where famous inventor Nikola Tesla gives him a jetpack with which to fight a bunch of alien-lizard-robot things called the Watchers so they don’t take over the world. Yeah…

Bizarre setting aside, Dark Void is so many games at once that it’s not easy to know where to begin. At times it feels almost like a platform-based adventure game along the lines of Uncharted, a comparison that’s even easier to draw with the shared vocal cords and attitude between Dark Void’s protagonist Will and Uncharted’s Mr Drake. Then all of a sudden, the game turns into a cover-based shooter – it’s here that it spends a lot of its time (especially early on) but if nothing else, Dark Void has one neat trick up its sleeve. As well as the usual ‘ducking behind rubble to avoid gunfire’ type cover, Airtight also implements an ingenious vertical cover system in some areas. It puts an odd but welcome twist on the usual mechanic, especially once you get your jetpack.
As soon as you sprout your ugly, steampunk wings, Dark Void changes entirely.

Vertical cover suddenly works both up and down, meaning you can boost up to ledges and take cover beneath them while dealing with enemies above as the camera pulls in behind you. This can be quite disorienting in some of the more confusing areas (of which there are plenty), but then we can only imagine that the ability to boost up walls and cling to things at will would indeed leave you wondering which way was really up after a while. And once you get your first taste of full flight, everything changes all over again. Where once you’d be scampering about looking for cover, you’re suddenly tearing up the sky in massive dogfights, pulling alien pilots out of UFOs to give them a spin when you fancy giving the jetpack a chance to cool down.

But it’s the way the flight mechanic is offered so freely from this point in that impresses most. In general, potential battlegrounds are extremely open and this leaves you all kinds of options. Do you stick to the ground cover and push forward slowly, make a gravity-defying blast for high ground and snipe your way to victory or just go all Rocketeer on the Watchers and hope you’ve got enough room to play around in. That’s always the biggest concern with the pack – it can be as much a hazard for you as it is a benefit if you get careless. All you need do is clip a few walls and you’re done for, meaning that you’ll want to spend a little time getting used to the flight controls and all the fancy tricks you can pull off. Once you nail that, swooping in for a strafing run before cutting the engines at the last second to land with a crushing melee attack on some unsuspecting fool is a treat indeed and one more satisfying and fluid than anything the likes of Bionic Commando can offer.

… continued