Though I had been looking at the screenshots and following some of the information out there on it, I didn’t get a good look at Dark Void, the latest announcement from Capcom and Airtight Games, until Capcom’s press event, CAPTIVATE08. While the developers weren’t letting people play it just yet, the specifics of the game seem very easy to understand, and also very easy to get excited about.
The game puts the player in the shoes of a dude named Will. Will is the sort of cocky hot-shot pilot who decides to fly over the Bermuda Triangle… and you can probably guess that things don’t go so well from there. Before long, Will gets wrapped up in a struggle that pits a group of human survivors against an invading alien force known as the Watchers. The humans fight back by turning Watcher technology against its creators, which in gameplay terms, means you’ll get to use a jet pack, jack UFOs, and generally mess up the enemies with a variety of wild weapons.
The on-ground action has a Gears of War-like look to it. Will can hide behind cover, blind fire, and pop out for aimed shots at his enemies, who also hide behind cover. One catch is that the cover is destructible. The other catch is that there’s no better way to eliminate hiding enemies than using a hoverpack to launch up above all that pesky cover and lay waste to the fools below.
The game also takes this fighting-from-cover concept and applies it to vertically oriented areas. The demo I saw showed Will using his jet pack to rocket up to a rock spire and cling to the bottom of it. From there, Will peeks his head around the edge and looks up. Enemies further up the spire can also hide behind cover and fire down at you. So you need to take them out and advance up the spire. This looks especially cool because as you’re taking down enemies, gravity gets the best of them and they start falling toward you.
The demo I saw had a pretty quick upgrade progression from hoverpack to jet pack, but it sounds like you’ll acquire plenty of other upgrades along the way, too. With the jet pack, you’ll be able to enter wide-open areas and fly around anywhere you want. The demo concluded with Will boosting into an area where Watcher UFOs ruled the skies. Using the jet pack, you’ll be able to grab onto the UFOs and steal them. Once you enter a UFO, the game looks like it essentially becomes Crimson Skies, with full-on dogfights and special evasive maneuvers.
The transitions from ground-based cover combat, to hovering above the ground, to straight-up flying appear to be really smooth, and the developers make it sound like you’ll have a lot of choices when it comes to just about any combat situation. Do you stick it out on the ground? Do you blast up into the air and attack from above? Or do you just go try to find a UFO to steal? It sounds like it could be pretty cool.
Another interesting thing about Dark Void is that it’s at least a year away, according to Capcom. With this brief demo sequence already showing a lot of potential, I was definitely left wanting to see more. Expect to see more on the game around E3.