Dark Void is the story of a cargo pilot who crashes into the Bermuda Triangle, discovering the secret of the mysterious disappearances that famously define the area - trans-dimensional aliens. They've been using humans as slave labor, and it's up to your character to join up with the renegade Survivors to overthrow their alien overlords and get everyone back home.

Like I said, at first glimpse the game is a standard third-person shooter. You can run and gun, duck and cover, or get up close and personal with melee attacks. Certain enemies can be taken down with special moves initiated with a button press, while other situations find you waggling your thumbsticks to escape the grasp of the robotic alien Watchers. Early build framerate chugging aside, the game just doesn't look all that impressive when looking at just the TPS bits.

So how does Dark Void set itself apart from the other run-of-the-mill shooters? It totally gets you high.

The vertical cover system in Dark Void allows you to climb sheer surfaces to get to higher elevations, but instead of tossing in a ladder like your average shooter, you actually cling to rock faces, take cover beneath overhangs, and jump upwards from outcropping to outcropping, fighting enemies all the while. Effectively the game takes duck and cover gameplay and tilts it upward.

Jumping and grabbing hold of a wall shifts the game perspective,maintaining the third-person view, only now you're looking up. From here you can fire at descending enemies, jump to higher hand-holds, and if the enemies get close you can always grab them and pull them off balance, sending them falling to their death.

At first it seems like a really innovative feature, the more I think about it the more I realize that it's pretty much the standard third-person gameplay with limited range of movement and a few different throwing moves mixed in. The whole climbing sequence feels a bit gimmicky to me.

So where does Dark Void excel? Airtight Games shows its pedigree when your protagonist straps on his jet pack and takes to the skies, battling enemies first with his fists, later with weapons. In the demo build I played you started off with no weapons at all, just a guy who happens to be flying, but latching onto one of the enemy UFOs initiates a mini-game of sorts that soon has you in control of the flying saucer, as well as its awesome aresenal of weapons.

Even at this early stage the jet pack portions of the game controlled intuitively. I had no problems guiding my rocketeer to his objectives. If Sega's Iron Man had featured similar flight controls it would still be alive today. The same can be said for the UFO controls - Airtight knows how to make flying fun.

My only worry is that the rest of the game will serve as merely generic filler between exciting flying missions, but it's still far too early to tell. Perhaps once the framerate is kicked and the code is vigorously polished I will be as blown away with the TPS segments as I was the jet pack segment. We'll just have to wait and see.

The story of Dark Void, if you aren't up to speed, is that our hero Will becomes trapped in the Void during a routine cargo flight that ventures a bit too closely to the Bermuda Triangle. Will and his compatriots, known as the Survivors, will battle a "mysterious alien race" known as the Watchers in order to save the Earth from (what else?) total destruction. Or something.

In addition to stock over the shoulder run and gun gameplay, Dark Void adds a few interesting tricks to the mix. Aerial ship-based combat, something that looks to please Crimson Skies fans, looks more than solid, as demonstrated by designer Jose Perez. He showed off the "skyjacking" of alien UFOs, classic saucer-style ships that can turn on a dime and be hijacked by Will without too much work. Using a rather simple mini-game, Perez showed how the player must avoid a UFO's security system while trying to access its control panel, ejecting the alien pilot and taking over.

Will can fly too, courtesy of a handy, Rocketeer-style jet pack, one that appears to be built (and further upgradeable) via alien technology. That jet pack not only gives him the opportunity to take flight to bypass traditional routes, it brings the "vertical cover combat" into play.

That mechanic can best be described by a 90-degree rotation of the player's axis of progression, as Will will take cover behind rocky ledges as he scales the side of a cliff, spaceship or building. It's pop-and-stop gameplay, with bursts of flight and a grip system that utilizes a mini-game to keep Will's hold on his surroundings steady.

Dark Void is still said to be at least a year off, with plenty of room for improvement and development beyond the brief portion we saw at Captivate. The team at Airtight have already ruled out multiplayer, something that may not sit well with gamers expecting that feature as a given—especially after they see the UFO combat and skyjacking gameplay.

We were pretty impressed with what we saw of Dark Void, despite some rather bland character design (that unfortunately reminded us of Haze in parts) and the lack of multiplayer modes, but with so much time left to get the thing right, we hope it stays on track. And we certainly look forward to getting our hands on the controller next time.

Pokémon USA will be offering the spooky little nightmare-guy at Toys R Us stores nationwide from noon to 4 PM on May 31st and June 1st. That's this weekend, so grab your DS and your Diamond or Pearl game and get ready to line up.

...I sound dangerously excited about this, I know. Hey, I ain't ashamed. Full details after the jump.

Official Press Release | May 28, 2008

It's a Pokémon player's dream come true! Pokémon USA, Inc. is offering an opportunity to receive the Legendary Pokémon Darkrai, during a two-day event at Toys"R"Us stores nationwide from 12 noon - 4 pm. During this time, all Pokémon aficionados who bring their Pokémon Diamond or Pokémon Pearl Game Card, along with their Nintendo DS, to any Toys"R"Us store in the United States have a chance to add one of the most sought-after characters in the Pokémon Universe, Darkrai, to their game. Darkrai, best-known for lulling people to sleep and causing nightmares, is the star of the latest movie, Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai, now available on DVD, and is featured in the new Pokémon Trading Card Game Diamond & Pearl-Majestic Dawn.

Who: All Pokémon fans

What: Darkrai distribution for your Pokémon Diamond or Pokémon Pearl Game Card

When: May 31 and June 1, 12 noon - 4 pm

Where: Toys"R"Us stores nationwide

There was enough Capcom news to fill a megaton sized shipping crate, including the announcement of Street Fighter IV, Bionic Commando and a Wii port of Okami. GameTrailers has a handy wrap up on everything that went down during the company's London Gamers Day, including an update on when we can expect more on Resident Evil 5.

Capcom's Dark Void may have gotten a little lost in the noise of this week's announcements of Lost Planet for PlayStation 3(!), Okami for Wii(!!) and Street Fighter IV(!!!). Based on this, the debut trailer for Dark Void, that may or may not have been such a bad thing. The game's visuals and gameplay make for an odd mix, lying somewhere between deadly serious and cartoonish. It's Airtight Games first project as a developer, but not the first for many of its employees. Some of the key team members came from FASA and Midway.

Along with this amazing news, Capcom also announced Lost Planet for the PS3, a new Ace Attorney game for the Nintendo DS featuring and new main character, and an all-new sci-fi action adventure game called Dark Void. It takes a special kind of company to wait 20 years from the release of the original game to finally get to number four in the series. I can't wait for the year 2012, when we'll be playing Super Street FIghter IV Hyper Mega Hologram Remix. Yum.

Street Fighter 4 announced! [Games Radar - Thanks Paul!]