Avoid!!!
The start of the year has had an unusually large number of big titles. Bayonetta, Army of Two II, and Darksiders have all hit. Now, we have Dark Void, Capcom's vertical-based 3rd person shooter. And an airborne combat game largely designed by many of the people behind Crimson Skies --- how in the world could this NOT end up awesome?
Well, Capcom pulled it off. With aplomb.
You play William Gray, an arrogant WW II pilot who is sent to an alternate dimension to fight off an alien race known as The Watchers. The rest of the story is a random hodge-podge of, well, assorted crap involving robotic aliens.
The game is a cornucopia of poor design combined with poor gameplay. The big part of the game is the jetpack, which is not all that easy to use and really not very fun to use. Up until the very end of the game, you will frequently faceplant into walls trying to fly around on your jetpack. You never feel terribly in control at any point, and that is a problem. Unless you're in a massively large area, you will feel little comfort in using your jetpack, which sadly makes the main selling point of the game a bit less useful for you.
You also spend a lot of time performing basic 3rd person shooting. And it's pretty bad, to be honest. Aim is a bit of a myth. Your reticle will indicate you have an enemy targeted, even when you clearly do not. And it will sometimes hit, but it will frequently miss. You don't have a lot of weapons and none of them are more effective than your fists, which is a bit sad. Melee attacks ---- a problem in way too many shooters --- has far more impact than your guns.
The levels can either be exceedingly short...or just endless. Some missions will take so long that you will want to quit rather than grind your way through it.
You are also able to hijack enemy UFO's, but they managed to put in one of the single most annoying QTE minigames to achieve that, which makes them ALSO not worth the effort. You hijack one and it takes one or two minutes to take them over...every single time. Who in the world would actually design a game where this is an occasionally important game mechanic that is simply annoying and irksome.
Dark Void was viewed highly before launch, but signs of concerns started to pop up when Capcom lowered its sales expectations by 50%. And that seems fairly accurate. The game is just busted on so many levels. I don't know what in the world Capcom was thinking with this because it was a total disaster.
