Dark Sector
Playtime: 8.5 hours (8.5 hours total)
I got Dark Sector as a gift; it was extraordinarily cheap ($7.05, which is less than a drink at Starbucks) and it got a not-terrible aggregated score of 72 on Metacritic. Now that I finished it, I'm not sure how I feel...I hated it in the middle, but I have a weird sort of nostalgia, like when you're living with someone you can't stand and keep fantasizing about the day you'll finally be rid of them and never have to hear from them again...then the day finally comes and as you watch them pack their filthy belongings into their car and paddle off you can't help but remember the really awesome waffles they made.
Waffles, in this case, are decapitations.
Dark Sector is a game with a pretty simple hook, and one that's stretched way too thin across an entire game. Due to an infection you get early in the story, your right arm (strangely enough it never spreads beyond that appendage) can generate a glaive which acts as a boomerang, and would probably put your eye out. You gain the ability to do an aftertouch, which means you can control the glaive after you've thrown it (to an extent), and steer it around trying to chop off as many people's heads as possible.
This makes the first couple hours of the game really fun.
Sure, there are some frustrations...the glaive has a limited reach that is never upgraded, and it always seems like enemies are just out of reach. Also, the glaive is disgustingly underpowered compared to your firearms, which means being infected is about as useful as having a cold. It's a fun mechanic, though.
Making a 9 hour game based solely on this is pushing it a little.
And that mechanic really is the only thing going for the game. The story is so completely bland that after watching the entire thing, I still couldn't begin to tell you the first thing that happened. The main character has no personality, and there are exactly 3 other characters in the game that get more than 5 seconds of screentime (including the villain). The gameplay is mediocre, the setting is boring, and the level design and bosses encounters are atrocious.
One thing that frustrated me in particular through the entire game was the lack of thought on the developer's part on making the game fun, which should always be a top priority in, you know, a game. Here are some examples:
- Picking up anything: weapons, items, money, even ammo, requires you position yourself squarely looking at it and hold down the X button. No instant pick up walking over it, or even just a quick press to grab it.
- Running is next to useless; you turn into a drunken ape charging forward, with little ability to actually change direction.
- Generally, the bigger a gun is, the more useless it is. Your starting pistol is by far the most powerful weapon you can have; my AK-47 took at least 10-15 more bullets to kill something. And when you get the ability to use a mounted machine gun turret? You might as well just give up and eat a sandwich instead, because none of those 50,000 bullets are going to do a goddamned thing. Now, I could be stupid, but to me a bullet is a bullet - if 1 bullet from a pistol kills an enemy, that enemy should probably go down pretty quick under a hail of machine gun fire.
- Money is ridiculously hard to come by, and you're punished for upgrading your weapons. Upgrades are gathered in the game itself, as hidden items, and you can take them to a shop to fit on your gun. The catch is, a gun can only have 2-3 upgrades, and once you set them, you can't ever remove them. So you spend the entire game not wanting to use a slot in case a really good upgrade comes along. If you do need a new weapon, good luck -- they start around $20k and go up to $40k. In my entire playthrough, I had enough money to buy exactly 2 new guns, and I only afforded the second one by selling the first. The game even has a safe where you can store extra weaponry...talk about misplaced design priorities.
- Boss battles strategies are unobvious. An early fight had me up against a mechanical dog with machine guns. Attacking with the glaive did nothing; shooting it did nothing, there were no environmental effects to use. And when I say 'did nothing', that is a guess, because there was no indication on whether or not my attacks were doing any damage. Eventually, I made out that there was a driver in the back of the dog (completely unprotected), but shooting him did nothing. I ran out of patience and looked it up, finding out I needed to electrocute the dog, and then run up behind him really really fast and do a button combo. Another later boss is completely impervious to any damage (again, no indication) until he randomly calls down a special attack I can use against him, which can take 1-2 minutes. How are you supposed to figure any of this out without ripping all your hair out?
- For the most part, the puzzles make sense -- but even so, they can get messed up. There was a raging fire at the end of a corridor, and my glaive had an ice element attached to it. I thought I could freeze the fire (not that that makes much sense), but everytime I tried, my glaive would 'pick up' the fire instead. I kept trying over and over until I finally discovered I had to freeze a specific small portion of a wall in order to put the fire out.
- Almost everything more than regular bullets insta-kills you.
- The level design is terrible. I lost count of the number of times I just had absolutely no idea what to do because the solution was convoluted or hidden by bad object placement.
- There's no choice for a difficulty level.
- Expanding on that, there's a ridiculous difficulty spike in the middle of the game that made me want to quit. In addition to the fact the enemies (now in throngs) start rushing you mercilessly, the entire combat dynamic changes. Instead of shooting enemies as you work through the map, each open area turns into a sort of arena, where you have to hunker down for about 10 minutes killing waves and waves of spawning enemies until it's all over, and you move on to the next open area.
- The character model for the main character is awful. This doesn't really make the game less fun, but damn he's ugly.
Huh. With a list of reasons that long for why the game isn't fun, I must be abnormally entertained by decapitation.
There were other good points, though...specifically the beginning, when it was all brand new, and the end couple chapters, especially the last boss. Though the end isn't all roses; late in the game you don a infection-y full-body suit that makes you look like Venom from Spider-Man. At last, I thought, they are going to change around the mechanics a bit...I'll get a new power or be able to melee people to death with my pinky or something. I mean for Christ's sake, once I put it on, I knocked down a reinforced iron door without a second thought! I am going to be like a god!
From my experience, the suit actually did fuck all. I still died in the same amount of hits, my glaive didn't do anything more special, my melee attacks were just as weak. The only thing that changed was that I looked like a tool in a Halloween outfit. The best part is the point of getting this suit was to fight the bodyguard of the final boss, who had kicked my ass several times before. When I finally fight him, guess how I beat him? Using the same damn abilities I've had the entire game.
The final boss fight was actually fun, and pretty well done. It put a glaze of sweetness over the shit that had been the middle of the game, so now that it's all over, I keep thinking...was it really that bad? Maybe I should replay it a bit to get some more achievements.
I have to find a new game before I lose my will.
