Now that I can get my phone to tell me where my car is and buy sex toys built to be exact replicas of the vaginas and anuses of famous porn stars, the future must surely have started.
Frankly, I would have settled for a space car as my future transport of choice, but I know a lot of people wanted jet packs and begrudge the fact that they don't have them yet.
The notion of having a rocket firing off right next to my behind has come to reek of imprudence to me, but I know that many people just don't feel like it's the future without a rucksack full of explosive materiel flinging them into the atmosphere. It's absolutely definitely (with loads of post-modern post-irony, then) that because of this, Capcom has given us a rocket pack-based game set back in the 1930s. Or maybe it just wanted a retro, pulpy-styled shooter?
Anyway,
Dark Void takes third-person adventure/shoot-'em-up fun and blends it with airborne jet-pack fun (OK, I should probably nail this now - it's a rocket pack that uses rockets, not jets - I just like the phrase 'jet pack' better). It takes place in the 'olden days' (the 1930s) and stars a chap called Will. He is a pilot who - while on a routine cargo flight with, coincidentally, his ex-girlfriend - finds himself lost in the Bermuda Triangle and thrust into an exta-dimensional space between our world and that of some nasty ETs called the Watchers.
Yes, it turns out that this place, dubbed The Void, is where all those lost folks from the Bermuda Triangle wind up. They've formed a resistance made up of survivors (called 'Survivors') to deal with the sinister machinations of the Watchers. These baddies aim to set up house on Earth as our alien overlords, with us lowly humans as their slaves - a state of affairs that was last seen back at the dawn of our civilisation.
The action mixes fairly standard ground-based shooter antics and rocket-fuelled vertical tomfoolery. On the ground, combat feels a tad reminiscent of
Uncharted's shootier aspects, complete with a cover system that feels very familiar if you've spent any time with
Gears of War. While the camera isn't as close to your shoulder as it is in
Gears (a factor that, while it sounds minor, makes it feel quite different to Epic's shooter) and the combat isn't as intense, the way in which you can hug cover and move from one relatively safe spot to another feels very similar to Epic's more brutish, hardcore shooter.
Where combat differs, however, is that you're not quite so likely to end up as meat paste should you forsake cover as you are in
Gears. While taking cover is certainly advisable in many parts of the game, taking a looser run-and-gun approach is not quite so suicidal as it is in other cover-based shooters.
Dark Void also significantly differentiates itself once you're strapped into your rocket pack. When you're not in full flight mode - something that doesn't become available to you (barring a brief intro at the very start of the game) until around an hour in - you have the option to hover. When hovering, you can gain a fair amount of altitude and cross a fair amount of ground. This lends (and I'm a little reluctant to use such a nobby PR term, but it rings true) verticality to proceedings. The verticality, in turn, enables a reasonable amount of strategising in a lot of the firefights.
You may well find that in some situations buzzing around in the sky - or getting to a lofty vantage point - helps when it comes to dispatching the watchers around you. You might want to hover and unleash a cascade of bullets or energy blasts, or you might want to pick off your foes one by one with a sniper rifle. Or it might be that getting up high leads to you being ripped apart by enemies who are also using jet packs. It all adds an extra dimension to proceedings that is both welcome and gay old fun.
