Dark Sector – Playstation 3
Borrows from the best, but loses its own identity
Dark Sector has so many similarities to Resident Evil 4 that it could be seen as an expansion pack for Capcom’s classic. Firstly, the plot focuses around a city infected by a disease. The infection, like RE4’s Las Plagas, turns regular folk into murderous zombies. There’s a shadowy figure attempting to create an army with these creatures. Then there’s the female double agent – she’s like Ada Wong, minus the sex appeal. And there’s even a blatant rip-off of the merchant – a mysterious bloke who hangs around an underground Black Market (more on this later). It’s that shameless. But while Dark Sector relies too much on RE4 for inspiration, it’s still a solid entry for Digital Extremes, and shows immense promise for their future projects.
Dark Sector is one of the best looking games around. Fact. The story follows the recently-infected Hayden Tenno, a US special ops bloke who’s been sent into the country of Lasria to cap a dictator who’s planning a revolution with the deadly disease. The way Hayden vaults over barriers realistically is impressive – and even the way he strides purposefully with his weapon drawn looks superb. The sun-drenched vistas that stretch across the game’s city of Larissa look great too, far more appealing than the jaggy brownness of, for instance, BlackSite: Area 51.
All of this beauty comes from the Evolution engine. Created by Digital Extremes, it feels like you’re playing a slick pre-rendered movie at times. It’s just a shame that most of Dark Sector is drowned in, well, darkness; while this creates a moody atmospheric feel it hides some excellent level design. The action’s weighty and visceral – hacking away at your enemy with your razor-sharp glaive before performing a Finisher move slices his arm clean off. Eugh.
We can’t help noticing Hayden is a slow walker, mind. Running is slightly better, though steering Hayden around enclosed areas is like riding a motorbike – he leans to one side when sprinting.
The best aspect of Dark Sector is the aforementioned glaive. It’s a boomerang/sword hybrid that you can fling at enemies while firing your pistol with the other hand. This makes for some pretty interesting battles. Down to your last three bullets and enemies moving in? No worries – a quick button tap and the glaive swooshes out, chopping one bloke’s arm off. Two perfectly aimed headshots take out the other two and finally – as the blade returns back to Hayden – it cuts the last one in half. Ouch. The glaive can be used for other things too, like retrieving ammo crates from far away, but it’s the moves you learn later that really sets the weapon apart from anything you’ve used before. You can even control the glaive’s flight path in slow-motion after it’s thrown. Alas, the puzzles that require you to perform this are increasingly annoying – you end up having to sling it through small gaps toward sources of electricity to charge it up before destroying magnetic door locks. There’s a bit too much of this throughout.
And this isn’t the only disappointing aspect of Dark Sector. The dark environments melt into one shadowy blur – almost every other level is set in a cave, creepy monastery or graveyard. Then there are the undead creatures. Sure, they’re quite scary as they run at you, but when they make with the cloaking devices you end up in gunfights with invisible enemies.
Even though the range of weapons on offer is pretty powerful – from shotguns to sniper rifles – the system to upgrade and buy new ones is faulty. The Black Market can be found by finding manholes and slipping down to a secret gun shop. Here you can add upgrades to your current weapons with power-ups you find as you go (like Accuracy or Stopping Power) or buy and sell guns. As in RE4, you have a case to store your unused weapons, but from start to finish we only ever had about three guns because there just isn’t enough cash lying about for you to be able to afford them all – meaning you can only stare at the better weapons.
Many of the boss battles are exciting, though. Taking on the colossus monster, smashing up a church and burning him with your fire glaive is a thrill, as is using the glaive to freeze falling water and encasing an enemy in ice before blowing him into a million pieces. There’s a Jackal tank for you to jump in, which can plough through barriers, fire bullets and launch neat little missiles that will take down groups of enemies in a single blast. You even learn an invisibility skill later in the game that allows you to sneak up on a foe and do them in with an instant Finisher move.
It’s just a shame that, for all of the entertaining bits, there’s so much repetition and disappointment. Take the moment when Hayden finally gets hold of <mild spoiler alert> the special ninja suit toward the end of the game. A samurai soldier who easily duffs you up early on was wearing this, so stepping into it should turn Hayden into an invincible beast, right? Nope. The only difference is that he can take a few more bullets and looks a bit different, which squashed our hopes of finally becoming a sort of superhero <spoiler ends>. Oh, and the battle with the final boss will leave you cold.
Dark Sector will provide you with hours of relentless action that you’ll be more than happy to spend your time with, but this definitely isn’t Digital Extremes’ opus. The weapon selection is stilted because of the unbalanced way in which you purchase them, the puzzles are seriously hit-and-miss, and the plot fails to grab your attention because you’ve heard the stories of infection and biological warfare before – as recently as Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, in fact.
As it stands, this is a stunning technical achievement, a dark horse, a must-rent and almost a must-buy. Sadly, it lacks the variety, pacing or innovation to make it truly essential.
We’d love a sequel (which seems likely judging by the ending) to expand on the fresh ideas found here, but until they dare to rely on some of their own ideas, Digital Extremes will always be the bridesmaid and never the bride. They’ve got the tools and potential to be a respected force, but Dark Sector isn’t quite the finished article we were hoping for.
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Viking: Battle for Asgard – Xbox 360
As splattery and graphic as an early Peter Jackson movie
This is old school hacking and slashing. Swords cleave skulls and axes rip windpipes as each enemy is reduced to man-mixed-grill. And it’s all performed by a barbarian whose genes seem to stem from a sordid bunk up between the World’s Strongest Man and an eighteen-wheeler. So with a swift tap of a button someone loses an arm, a couple of stabs of another button and a skeleton finds himself deep-throating a broadsword and with a flurry of taps on yet another button a drawbridge comes down or a door swings open. Yes, every part of the pad takes a pounding, but don’t mistake this rapidity for vapidity. Just because the button-presses are numerous and fast, doesn’t mean that they are brainless.
Because while Viking has as many hacked off heads as the Nth Highlander straight-to-DVD movie, it’s nowhere near as one-dimensional. Sure, it wears its heart on its sleeve, a liver in its top pocket and a fashionably knotted scarf of entrails, but there’s enough roaming to garnish this gore. Because while the tightly scripted story of Norse gods has a plot to push and set-piece drama to deliver, this is a game that knows when to funnel and when to let you wander.
So each one of the three hefty islands begins by allowing you to stroll around taking on small missions, light fights and seemingly unimportant side quests. But along with earning money, skills and (sadly, but predictably) magic, you’ll also find yourself liberating a beer hall full of identi-bearded Viking warriors.
It’s because our hero Skarin is more than just a deceased warrior, resurrected by the gods to hold back the massed forces of the underworld and protect their realm from Evil’s incursions – Skarin is also a leader of men. So throughout the game these liberated square-jaws join your unshaven army. And while they never fall under your direct command, they are vital to your progress.
Each island of the three then climaxes with an epic set-piece battle, or two. Well, ‘battle’ doesn’t do them justice – these are wars. They make Dead Rising’s mass retail ruckuses seem like playground slaps. And even with literally hundreds of warriors shambling about, all fighting, all blocking and all dying, somehow everything remains fluid, detailed and HD-pretty. The only real comparison is with an RTS but those collective crusades tend to be seen from eight miles high, not within eyeball splattering-radius.
The only thing that lacks luster as these warrior automatons make a believable stab at swashbuckling is the sound. This is meant to be Good-vs-Evil clashing on the cusp of Armageddon but somehow it lacks so much atmosphere as to be eerie, not scary. War should be louder than this, not least to compete in tera-decibels with the legendary Brian Blessed’s bellowed voice-over. Where are the clinks of mace on chainmail, the howls as Viking bone is twatted into powder and the banshee screams of Berserkers in battle? Sure, the score is good and the vocal acting more than up to scratch, but the SFX are just too wimpy and sparse both on the frontline battle and while you wander.
Perhaps a little more smoke and a few shinier mirrors might do the trick, because without the wailing of war or perhaps a few dramatic but harmless trebuchet shots landing nearby, you don’t always feel the drama in your very marrow, as you surely should. This is a fight for the survival of your people but you don’t feel part of the whole, just the ‘hole who started this war.
As you might have guessed, this being a game in which Brian has megaphoned in the narration and which has a rating on the box broadcasting its whorey-goriness, Viking isn’t subtle. The platforming element is so light you’ll only notice it when you accidentally press jump in a mid-fight fumble. The puzzle parts extend as far as a glowing arrow and hammering that poor old action button again. But who cares when the finishing moves – triggered with a single tap of a button and shown with slo-mo aplomb – are a biology lesson by broadsword? When heads, ribs, limbs and offal are pinged across every screen, and when stumps seep enough blood to transfuse a hemophiliac blue whale? Exactly. These guys aren’t just dining in hell tonight; they’ve ordered coffee, booked a room and have already stuffed the monogrammed dressing gowns into their little wheelie Samsonites.
While these pre-rendered dismemberments are easy to pull off, getting to deliver the final blow isn’t always so simple. While the lowliest grunts can be diced with a few blind stabs at the buttons, the Legion promote enough freaks to ward off any complacency in combat. So special moves have to be earned, learned and used, while defeating any of the myriad of sub-bosses requires that you master the ducks and dodges. And with a generous smattering of restart points even the Kratos-inspired Quick Time dispatches for these ‘end of area’ nasties don’t shred your nerves.
The combat system too copes well with the massed battles – even if the camera sometimes struggles. It immediately locks onto the nearest enemy, but a jerk of the analog stick will soon see it picking up the guy behind, or to the left, or the right, making it ideal against groups but also suitable for mano-a-mano mash-ups. But don’t expect any of Dante’s acrobatics, juggles or perfectly timed counter strikes because with a block that works in 360 degrees and doesn’t demand precise timing, this is a fighting system designed to be mastered by all, not memorised by just a few solitary hardcore.
The camera does cause more substantial problems, however, when Skarin stoops his bulbous frame into a ‘stealth crouch’. To emphasise the effect, the camera drops in low over his shoulder, instantly placing any low scenery such as fences or boxes that you might be hiding behind smack into the centre of your view. It’s not really a problem on the open spaces of Midgard but when you’re sneaking through a packed enemy encampment, it can be annoying.
While unleashing hell at your signal might be what makes Viking stand out as a slasher, the mass battles aren’t the best part of this button-masher. They are the dramatic bookends, the climax when the sap rises and the fluids spurt. The real joy is in the unexpected but magnificently vicious scuffles with an unseen patrol, the fifteen or so hours spent exploring the hills of Midgard or spearing a snoozy sentry as he squirms in his sleeping bag.
But for all the glee of the slaughter, Viking is a game butting its head against the limits of its genre. There isn’t great variety in the tasks or the bosses you face and a few more genuinely off-story quests would be nice. But the exploring adds life and longevity far beyond the standard eight-hours-start-to-finisher slasher, and you probably won’t notice the complete lack of any multiplayer element, or the lack of chained combos, platforms, acrobatics or rankings because Viking is happy to just be a slasher.
Anyway, your poor mortal brain already performs billions of calculations every second: walking, breathing, and keeping you dry in the groinal region (hopefully). So after a long day of left, right, in, out, clench, clench, release, why not enjoy a game that doesn’t challenge every synapse in your cerebrum to pop and fizzle? Especially when the sweet release of olde-school slaughter in Viking: Battle for Asgard can numb your brain at the same time as your thumbs.
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