While its innovative premise and exciting aerial combat highlight this ambitious shooter, reviewer Cameron Lewis found Dark Void’s lackluster AI, short campaign, and lack of polish detrimental to the game’s overall experience.
If you’ve ever wished you could get one of those lumbering no-necked thugs from Gears of War to leap more than a few inches off the ground, you’ll appreciate Dark Void’s concept of “vertical cover”: the ability to blast skyward and grapple onto something high overhead to gain a tactical advantage is initially thrilling. Unfortunately, that exhilarating gimmick quickly becomes tiresome and the disjointed, uneven experience will leave you reaching for the barf bag.
Dark Void’s development team includes some of the same talented folks who birthed the Crimson Skies series, so their pedigree for high-flying games can’t be argued. That expertise really pays off with an introductory sequence that really flies (pun intended): after a quick primer mission, you hop into the pilot seat as Will Grey, a square-jawed jockey who wrecks his plane on an uncharted island in the Bermuda Triangle and fumbles his way into a grim parallel universe of hissing Watchers and desperate resistance fighters. What starts as a mission to repair your busted ride becomes a quest to save humanity from alien invaders. Unfortunately, the game quickly degenerates into a repetitive and unsatisfying experience that fails to fully capitalize on the initial sense of inertia. Hurtling between huge rock columns in the alien equivalent of Monument Valley while blasting agile flying saucers to bits is fun at first but the novelty quickly wears thin, especially when you realize that every aerial arena is virtually identical to the one you just conquered
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A financial performance update reveals Ubisoft’s plans for DS development, game delays, and new games.
According to a financial performance report, Ubisoft is delaying Splinter Cell: Conviction and R.U.S.E. to April 2010 and a hazy “2010-2011″ respectively.
The also report says Ubisoft is developing new titles for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and scaling back development for Nintendo DS games. CEO Yves Guillemot revealed that the company fell short of its financial goals this year between shrinking sales in the DS and Wii casual markets and under-performing or under-selling titles like James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game.
Interestingly, the report lists the Conviction and R.U.S.E. delays as contributing factors in Ubisoft’s operating losses, suggesting that they’re not part of a financial strategy to shield the games from competition in the February release lineup. Calls to Ubisoft for comment on this matter were not immediately returned.
It’s not all bad news out of Ubisoft, however, as the report also reveals that Assassin’s Creed 2 sales topped 6 million and that the game is on-track to hit 9 million by the end of March.
Going forward, Ubisoft plans to scale back development for the DS and ramp up development on its major franchises on Xbox 360 and PS3. The report reveals that Ubisoft is already working on a new game in the Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon series, Driver, a fourth Raving Rabbids game and a new “episode” of Assassin’s Creed which they say will have an online multiplayer mode.
An ambitious re-imagining of Konami’s spine-tingling masterpiece, Shattered Memories proves itself an innovative, if flawed take on one of the forefathers of the survival horror genre.
My first exposure to Konami’s Silent Hill series of scare-fests was back in 1999, fresh off of a week-long bender of Resident Evil 2. Ready for even more malformed monsters and mutant crocodile menaces, I was somewhat surprised when I powered my Playstation on to find an incredibly different environment than RE2’s Raccoon City. Instead of facing a horde of genetically altered flesh-eaters, I was met with twisting camera angles, hauntingly melodic background music, and faceless creepy crawlies straight out of Jacob’s Ladder. Silent Hill’s titular fog-infested locale was frightening in a much more psychological sense, creating a general sense of uneasiness and anxiousness that offered a nice change of pace from RE’s conventional Romero-esque scare tactics.
The franchise hit a high point with the scarring Silent Hill 2, a journey through the psyche of a tortured widower that garnered both critical and commercial acclaim; after a relatively successful direct sequel to the original with Silent Hill 3, the franchise slowly headed back to obscurity with the remarkably dissimilar Silent Hill 4 (originally not even a Silent Hill title), then ran safely back towards the horror conventions it tried so hard to stray from with the American developed Silent Hill: Homecoming. Despite its masterfully frightening origins, the Silent Hill series fell victim to contrived and confusing plot twists, as well as several inherent gameplay issues such as unwieldy cameras and a slow, cerebral pace that proved too taxing for survival horror fans accustomed to Resident Evil’s gut-wrenching pace.
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