Digital Extremes is well known
for it's hand in the Unreal franchise, particularly
the multiplayer games Unreal Tournament. By
2005 they developed their own new IP; Pariah,
which was an average game at best. Warpath followed
a year later and I didn't have the heart to
play it since Pariah was a skippable title and
Warpath was critically received as even worse.
So it's not a far stretch to
assume their next IP; Dark Sector, might fail
as well. It's an early-2008 game although it
didn't get a PC port until 2009. Fortunately
Digital Extremes have developed their own engine
for Dark Sector instead of re-using the aging
Unreal Engine 2.5, or at least aging in their
hands.
The engine, named Evolution,
does a pretty good job of making the game look
appealing. My only complaint is that they went
way overboard on the post-processing and visual
effects. The amount of blurring on anything
that isn't direcly in the centre of the screen
and up close, is ridiculous. But the lighting
all looks good. It looks about what you'd expect
for a 2007/2008 gaming engine with all the visual
effects hammed up to the max. Very, very similar
looking to Infernal.
The art is also satisfying
with tonnes of details on the textures throughout
the game. Most of the levels look solidly good
all throughout the game; there's nothing dull
here. But there's also nothing awe-inspiring.
The levels are all tight and claustraphoic,
with a slow walking speed so you don't really
notice that between each level load there's
really only a few rooms sometimes. It's a corridor
crawler basically, although with plenty of outdoor
areas as well, they're still very linear and
tight with random, unrealistic barriers used
for cover everyone. There's no treking off the
beaten path for exploration in Dark Sector,
so expect linearity at it's hardcore.
The gameplay is where Dark
Sector fails for me. Crystal Dynamics introduced
a variety of unique features into the game,
most notable the spinning blade you launch at
enemies while holding a handgun in your left
hand. So you can shoot and blade at the same
time, which is great for a while. The first
half of the game has you up against humans with
guns; nothing different to every other shooter,
but at least it's fun. Then a little past halfway
they change into the infected, which are basically
Doom 3 Imp's that fire yellow or blue crap at
you. Two good shots from this fast projectile
stuff and your dead. The health is regenerating
but once the screen goes red it's several painstaking
seconds before your health has returned to normal.
Furthermore the infected are launched at you
in spawns of 3, 4, 5 at a time and as soon as
they're dead more keep spawning. As you get
further into the game and different types of
monsters are introduced, they have more and
more health to the point where you need to hit
one four or five times with the blade to kill
it. Four or five times?! I might as well be
using saucer than a hardcore three-edged blade!
This all wouldn't be so bad
if there were quicksaves, but of course Crystal
Dynamics doesn't care about PC standards, they're
all about consoles, so you'll be replaying many
of the checkpoints two or three times till you
get through. It feels like sometimes getting
through a fight is more luck than skill in Dark
Sector. If you just happen to run the wrong
way and there's an infected imp spoofing you,
and you miss the powerhit, then you won't get
away because the damn player moves too slowly.
It's a lot easier if you're
able to use your guns and blade 50/50, but there's
not quite enough ammo for that, so you'll spend
a lot of time hiding behind cover picking things
off slowly. Most of the game isn't too bad,
but it's just some scenes where you have monsters
spawning over and over again and it can get
quite overwhelming in the later stages.
What they need to do to fix
it was make the blade FAR more powerful. Sure
you can do a more lethal hit if you hold the
blade key down and release it at the perfect
time, but it's hard to get the timing right
so you'll only get the powerhit 40-50% of the
time. The blade should have been an awesome
weapon of destruction ripping through enemies.
Along with a faster player and perhaps less
reliance on the Gear Of War-ripoff cover gameplay
and a faster regenerating health system, and
Dark Sector would have been a much more enjoyable
game. Either that or include a damn difficulty
selection instead of just one difficulty.
And the boss battles were some
of the worst I've ever played without any quicksaving
or checkpoints during the battles - they're
hardly worth wasting your time on without putting
a cheat on to get through it.
Overall a good looking game,
despite there not being anything too epic, but
the gameplay could have been a lot more fun
but just became monotonous and annoying by the
last quarter of the game.
