Kotaku
Digital Extreme's Dark Sector is meant, it feels, to be the beginning of something, a game that serves as an origin tale and set piece for what could become a franchise. In the game you play as Hayden Tenno, a black-ops agent sent into Eastern Europe to assassinate someone. Things go astray, as these things often do, and Tenno is infected with a virus that gives him evolving and deadly powers; chief among them the ability to boomerang an organic three-bladed knife at people, lopping off appendages.
Digital Extreme probably had a no-brainer hit when the decided to let people lop off body parts with a deadly Frisbee, but in their pursuit for something more they may have missed the mark this time around.
Loved
The Glaive: As if lopping off enemies' legs and arms with a flying three-bladed disc weren't fun enough, Dark Sector lets you slow down time and guide it along it's path with the PS3's tilt controls. (Which works amazingly well) You can also absorb electricity, fire and ice with it, allowing you to do things like freeze over lakes you have to cross or turn waterfalls into bullet-deflecting cover.
Gruesome Finishing Moves: Call me a fan of action violence, but I love being able to weaken a creature or enemy and then walk up and sink my glaive through its arm, or cut out its intestines and lop off their head in one move.
Puzzling Boss Battles: The boss battles, and there are a lot of them, almost all require as much thinking as it does shooting and throwing. The final fight in the game is particularly brutal.
Weapon System: It's not all about the glaive in Dark Sector. You can also upgrade your weapons through a black market, a requirement because the ones you find on the street tend to explode after a few minutes use.
Hated
Delayed Abilities: While it's a rather lengthy game, it takes far too long to give you the abilities that make playing it actually fun. Typically that isn't a problem, but the game has so little else to offer that, sans your evolving powers, Dark Sector feels like a generic, rather bad shooter.
Weak Glaive: Lets face it, none of use are going to buy this game to shoot people. Dark Sector is all about the amputation and designing it so that you can't lop off a limb without several hits is just plain stupid.
Shallow Plot, Bad Dialog: Wow, just wow. The plot is an amalgam of every old sci-fi and military movie. You've got your scorned lover, your grumpy old Russian scientist, your patriot-loving general. Thank god they let you skip each and every cut-scene... immediately.
Trite Character Design: The look of some of the main characters go hand-in-hand with that hackneyed plot, but the one I can't figure is lead Hayden Tenno. Since when do Emo kids go black-ops when they grow up?
Bugs: While the technical glitches aren't as pronounced later in the game, early on they can be quite distracting and it never shakes the occasional chugging.
When I first checked out early code of Dark Sector I hated it. When I started playing it I hated it. In fact, there were times when I was playing through it that I honestly considered just stopping and moving on. But something kept me coming back for more. Most likely the glaive and the impressive ways you can use it to, at times, literally shape a level. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really shake out its kinks until nearly half-way through and the elements of the game that are truly unique and impressive tend to get lost in a glut of generic gunplay.
Next time, more Jackal and Aftertouch and less running and gunning.
Dark Sector was developed by Digital Extremes, published by D3 Publisher of America and released on March 25 on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Retails for $59.99. Campaign played to completion, online modes sampled on PS3.
Comments
I will read after I comment. OWNT
the glaive sounds interesting enough. its worth a rental.
Need to rent this one, don't think it's a buy.
@funkpanda: Coolest guy on the internet.
I just think it's superb that the main weapon of this game is a Professor Frink noise.
"And here we have the GLAIVE for the spinning and the cutting with the GIBS IT's painful!"
Since when do Emo kids go black-ops when they grow up?
HA! That's what I thought. He looks like such a wuss. No offence to "Emos".
Anywho, this game is too boring for me. I might buy it for half price or something. Just too much shoot, slash, slay & watch body parts fall off these days.
@funkpanda: That's equivalent to a "first" comment...and a possible BAN HAMMA ATTACK, buddy.
@funkpanda: FUCKING BANNED
When will you people learn? Stupidity = BANNING.
I just beat the game last night and enjoyed it for what it is.
I was more irritated with how overly sensitive the controls were, and how my main character prefered to stick to walls and cover WAY too much when using the A button. I thought Marcus Phoenix was a bad wall humper, the main character of darkSector is 10 times worse.
Also its irritating how it doesnt tell you when your special abilities are ready again such as the shield / exploding elemental attack.
Nice graphics and animation though. This game would have been better if it came out in the earlier part of the 360s lifetime, since now it just has too many titles to go up against with overly high expectations by many.
Not to mention it looks exactly like a mod of a Gears of War
maybe a rental for me. almost definitely not a buy, esp. after this review!
@Candlejack: Actually theres not many games nowdays that allow for human dismemberment if you think about it.
Everything is just ragdoll fall down dead pretty much.
The days of gibs and gore are long gone for the most part.
God I wanted this game so badly a couple years ago when it was Metal gear in space.
I can't believe the 180 they did. If you haven't seen the 8 minute trailer they released originally go check it out.
@Kyle81: Yeah this game was more GoW than AoT was. I mean like seriously.
I really wanted to like this game. The idea of an appendage-slicing boomerang was just too good, but unfortunately, it appears the game failed to capitalize enough on the one thing that made it cool.
he's a smoldering manchild that makes me want to sing 'Tarzan Boy' by Baltimora while I play.
naked.
covered in olive oil.
you people are way too judgemental.
Also, one man's 'shallow plot' is another man's 'a billion times better than metal gear anything'.
@funkpanda: Yeah...but what good does that do?
On the subject, the part about the delayed abilities. I know it is of a sour note, but how is it compared to say DMC4 or God of War in terms of getting abilities?
@DugDawg: Yeah the glaive is just too weak and its unfortunate that it never really evolves during the game too.
That and for some reason the melee in game is WORSE in the final version than the TGS demo. Since I was meleeing the fuck out of everyone at the TGS which was pretty cool. In the final version the hit detection is so off its not even funny.
@Dr.Chocobo: Its basically you advance in stages and stuff is unlocked automatically.
Im also disappointed by the fact you cant play through the game again with the same equipment you had bought / upgraded the first time through. Since its impossible to get enough $$$ to buy everything with just one play through. And would give the game a bit more life being able to screw around with the other gear granted its not that different from eachother.
@Witzbold: And that is an absolute disgrace. Soldier of Fortune, Jedi Outcast with dismemberment on - just wouldn't be the same without it (Soldier of Fortune wouldn't be worth playing actually).
@Witzbold: Dismemberment, probably not in shooters, no. Well, except the occasional splatter from grenades or rocket launchers, primarily in UT.
But we do get a lot of that in hack and slay's. Not that it's a bad thing. It's just that, in this game, the whole setting is so cliché that everything else just seems copied anyways.
I hate how there's no feedback for your energy shield. If you use it you have to count mississipies until it's ready to be used again. I mean, I understand the idea of not wanting any ui in the game but the least they could do is make you glow a little and vibrate the controller when your shield is ready.
Most people are saying that this is a must rent, not a must buy. I felt that way about Army of Two having played it with a friend all the way through and about a third of the way solo afterwards.
The "ah ha" moment for me when reading this review had nothing to do with the game but rather the statement at the end. "Campaign played to completion, online modes sampled on PS3." speaks volumes and is greatly appreciated in an era when certain mens magazines have the balls to publish reviews of audio CDs without having ever listend to them. Proud of my ol'Kotaku.
Is that a Krull Blade?
@Klappstuhl: The one in Krull had five blades. Though they are functionally similar.
@Candlejack: Well the UT series has always had gibs so that doesnt really count. Same with Quake.
You must admit though that a lot other games are moving away from gore and such. I suppose the whole overly protective alarmist state of affairs with anti-game activists has a part to do with that also. Granted Im glad that not everyone is doing the over the top shit that we used to see all over the PC before, but still to some reasonable level it would be nice to see back in.
You cant call something cliche thats not even related to the medium we are dealing with just becuase it has dismemberment. Now if it was copying the same type of animations or style like when EVERYONE DECIDED BULLET TIME WAS TEH SHEIT that is what I would call cliche. This not really.
It was just poorly executed.
@Guild_Navigator: For me its more like you use the shield twice or was it three times then you cant use it again for a while which pissed me off. Kinda like the elemental explosion with the blade. After 2-3 times in a row it doesnt work again for a while.
They really needed some sort of indication when you could use it again like you said.
Oh yes and since those fucking pricks at MS Japan have frozen my live account due to some sort of payment error, more like being held for ransom I cant make a comment on how well the MP is.
Since asides from beating the game on the hardest setting / finding all the upgrades the rest of the APs is to be gained from MP.
Any comments for the multiplayer Brian? (or anyone else that bought the game)
Yes, more dismemberment in games please. I'm in the middle of Condemned 2 right now on the museum level using weapons like broad swords and battle axes. Lotsa fun but it would be sooooooo much cooler with some hot dismemberment action.
I'm really bummed that Dark Sector isn't great. Several months ago I really thought it looked like it may end up being something special. Oh well...
I had high hopes for this game initially when I saw the 8 minute trailer a few years ago.
Unfortunately, I was somewhat dissapointed by the final effort.
I loved the glaive, but there were too many let downs, character and level design being major sores on a generally (graphically) pleasing game.
Glaive sounds interesting... but that's about it =/
@risingphoenix: Really I had thought that the level design was rather decent. Granted it had the overly obvious COVER OBJECTS syndrome though.
If anything I was more let down by how little monster variation there was.
The boss fights were nice though!
Overall though I enjoyed the game. Kinda the same way I enjoyed bullet witch. Still gotta go through that game and complete my save in hard mode.
At least in bullet witch you can play through the game again with the powered up weapons unlike darkSector.
I actually like this game. Its just a solid all around fun game. There are some bad points about it that was mentioned but the game is for some reason addictive. If they make a sequal then all they need to do is clean it up a bit, give us some more powers, fix the bad points and its win win.
I wonder if some games are just destined to be buggy? I mean this games been in production since a year before the 360 was released and every time I hear about an improved build the same old "nice enough but buggy as hell" comments come up.
Shame about the combat/Glaive not being too well utilized I really wanted to go Krull on someone since I first saw the game.
Oh well I'll grab it when it comes down in price I guess.
Here's hoping for a Krull weapon in Ninja Gaiden 2!
@Witzbold: Perhaps you could ban people with less childish displays of your super cyber-authority than "FUCKING BANNED." It seems like such behavior only contributes to the very practices you're trying to weed out, i.e., in your own words, "stupidity." The discourse on Kotaku tends to be of the sort of quality that merits more mature behavior from posters, let alone from an official representative of the site.
On an unrelated note (actually, on a very related note), I rented the game, played it for fifteen minutes and returned it the next day. Whew.
I rented this over this the weekend (about 4 or 5 chapters through so far) and so far it's nothing stellar. While it has the same general look of Gears of War, it doesn't have nearly the same satisfaction in gun play. Even after fiddling with the aim sensitivity, you character still feels too floaty, and aiming on target can be a hassle.
The glaive is a fun weapon but melee combat, which you would think would be a core staple with a weapon like this, is horribly inaccurate and ineffective. This means your best bet is aiming for decapitations with the glaive (always fun) or going for head shots (preferably with a shotgun before it explodes on you). Even this isn't as fun as it "should" be. The floaty aiming mechanic and weak audio and controller feedback of your firearms hinders what could have been a visceral combat experience.
From the sound of it, I believe I still have a ways to go with the game, and I intend to spend more time with it. The game isn't horrible, but it's not spectacular either. It merely exists.
@Witzbold: You are on FIRE! Unleash the ban-Glaive!
Seems like most games that get delay way after their original dates fall short of their goals and become very mediocre and blend in with the typical and don't outshine in the area they are supposed to.
Dark Sector was to be near launch of 360 and the first announced next-gen title, and it fell short.
@TokeYo: Well the game wasnt as buggy as other titles I must say. I think a lot of the problems were more design mechanics that were not thought out well.
Like a major one for me is not having a bloody sensitivity setting for movement, only in aim mode. Since jesus its feather touch outside of aim mode.
That and the cover system just works TOO well so our hero goes sticking to everything and anything like a magnet if you are too close to an object and want to roll. Kinda frustrating at times when that occurs.
But like big showstopper or blatant bugs I didnt really notice, asides from the friggin hit detection with the melee attacks. That has so got to be a bug, since at the TGS it wasnt horrible like it is now. :x
@Guild_Navigator: I finally figured out that his right, i think, shoulder has a glowing mark on it when it's ready to use.
@TokeYo:
The glaive isnt too bad its just kinda weak when you throw it even in its non-powered up state and it goes thru guys. Another instance is when you use the B button to do melee attack it doesnt really do anything, it feels like im a woman hitting a man with my purse. If they put some decent melee attacks in the next game and give the glaive a little more UMPH then it will definatly feel like krull :)
Kinda pisses me off that nobody is bothering to mention how the original, fascinating concept of Dark Sector, which was a Sci-Fi stealth/action title with a brilliant score of taiko music to accompany the game, was scrapped almost in its entirety for this. And while what a game was shouldn't reflect the review of what a game is now, I'm disappointed to see that nobody even mentions the previous, completely superior design of Dark Sector. It could have been one of the best 360 titles on the console. Now it's...generic.
If anyone is interested, here's what Dark Sector used to be.
[www.gametrailers.com]
[www.gametrailers.com]
[www.gametrailers.com]
@超外人: Yeah I totally could have seen this game shining through if it was a near launch title. Its just WAAAAAAAAAAY overdue in the overly saturated / jaded market now. :x
@Brian Crecente: Were you able to try out MP? Im curious to what its like.