Review: Dark Sector

written on Saturday, June 27, 2009

This post was an hour late.

I picked up Dark Sector for $10 on Steam at the same time I picked up Zeno Clash. And while Dark Sector is more of a mindless action game, that's what I was in the mood for. The main gimmick for the game is that you have a spiky whirly thing called a glaive (basically the thing from Krull) that you use to kill guys.

At first it feels like the game has a lot of potential to let you do fun stuff. You can huck your glaive at guys and keep shooting with your gun. You can pick up weapons and items with the glaive. And you can steer the glaive in mid air to do fancy wall bouncing attacks. You can charge the glaive with various elements to solve puzzles and kill guys in a larger variety of ways. But none of it's actually much fun.

A huge amount of it has to do with the controls. You can't cancel out of any animations, so it's easy to get stuck doing something that you didn't want to do. And the context sensitive actions sometimes flicker on and off, making it even easier to get stuck doing the wrong thing. I didn't die from it too much, but it made the game feel clunky.

The cover system also had some rough edges. The main problem was that it didn't work consistently. Some cover just didn't work, and cover that did work against normal firearms often wouldn't block shotguns very well. It didn't make much sense.

All in all Dark Sector was a mediocre action game. I see the promise of its ideas. Who wouldn't love to kill a guy with a giant blade thingy, grab his gun remotely, gun down his friends, then do it all over. But it never quite gave me the tools to make those types of scenarios feasible.

3 of 5