Dark Void was poorly rated and generally maligned when it came out, and with good reason. It was buggy, janky, and had terrible pacing that was clearly the result of cut content (as a string of bossfight levels showed) but my mind keeps wandering back to it because it did so many things right. Not only was dogfighting relatively cool but its gravity switching mechanic and jumping from cover to cover with the jetpack stuff was intereting and different from everything else on the market. I'd love to see some of these ideas make it into newer games with more polish and thought. In a world of chest high cover walls and samey shooters Dark Void let you soar and strafe and hover. More games should be that ambitious and offer the player that many options and choices. Dark Void may not have been a good game but at least it was memorable and interesting, which is more than you can say for most.

I didn't try it

I think that inversion has some of the same cover shooting stuff on the sides of walls, but it's meant to be awful. I want to love Dark Void so much. It clearly has a lot of love for The Rocketeer... hell, he even looks like The Rocketeer. The story is a weird mishmash of crazy ideas. Weird tribal people, Nazi-alien-interdimensional-snake-reptile-people and flame dragon monsters. It has Nolan North being Nolan North with some wonderful main character designs and jetpack battles, but it still manages to be kinda bad.

One of my biggest problems with the air combat was that some enemies would just take so long to kill. Their shields would take forever to deplete and then you'd have to find them and they'd zip away really fast. It felt like a chore at times, even with fully upgraded guns and rockets.

Yeah. Dark Void is a bunch of wasted potential, such a shame. I really should try that 8-Bit game. I remember people liking that. One thing the game has going for it is it's old movie styled orchestral soundtrack mixed with heavy bass and guitar solos. It gives the game it's own unique sound. Easily one of my favourite soundtracks of the last (ish) generation.

The ideas and the core concept were great (probably the closest any game as gotten to doing jetpack flight well), but it was just super janky in every way. The fact that you need to play for like 3 hours before you can fly around doesn't help, and those 3 hours are just the WORST cover based TPS I've ever played.

More games should have Deadly Premonition's beard tech.

I think offering choices and options is about more than giving the player a lot of directions to move in 3D space. You could play around with the gravity and fly up into the air and that was really cool in some ways, but there are games much closer to the run-of-the-mill game which manage to provide far more choice and variety than Dark Void ever did by being smart about their level design, weapon design, enemy design, and other features. Additionally, while being able to move and fight on multiple dimensional planes at once looks great on paper, in practise it often meant that you'd be getting shot by all sorts of enemies you couldn't see and sometimes had to move around in a really disorienting fashion. Even the gravity-shifted fights largely just recontextualised that brand of samey chest-high-wall shooter combat.

Still, yes, I think there's a lot of potential in some of that game's ideas, it would be great to see someone try to pick up and run with that stuff, and I really appreciate that Dark Void was trying to do something different. I'm a little sceptical of how much there is in that gravity shifting mechanic, but I love me a good jetpack and being able to dash from cover to cover was a solid feature. If someone could clean that stuff up and actually make it play like a decent shooter I'd probably buy that.

Offering choices can be about a lot of things, but Dark Void's movement system created a whole lot of opportunities that the game never exploited. The multi-dimensional stuff looked cool and the practical issues could be solved in a bunch of ways (enemy placement being the simplest solution.) There were also cool variations like in one level towards the end where you have to fight your way towards the bottom of a hanger and can only travel down from cover to cover but not back up. That created an interesting feel, especially when you had to choose between trying to kill an enemy from vertical cover or dropping down to fight on the horizontal plane knowing you couldn't get back up.

The best parts of the game, however, were the jetpack and the dogfighting, and the ability to dogfight in large expansive areas and then go into installations and fight like a typical third person shooter added scope, variety, and a very different feel to some of the levels. All the complaints in this thread are valid, but they aren't about Dark Void's concepts but rather its execution, which most people agree wasn't great. It was a great idea for a game that didn't work because it was poorly executed, and it seems like because of the poor reception nobody wants to try any of its ideas again.

@bigsocrates: I agree that its problems are largely in execution, I only said what I did in my original post because in your post you said that the game provided a lot of opportunity, but I think as we both see it the game couldn't offer the degree of choice it actually wanted to because it wasn't able to properly implement its ideas. Still, I do maintain that Dark Void's big 3D battlescapes were conceptually flawed and there are other higher-level issues in that design like the ability to dash from cover to cover potentially removing one of the main risks and challenges associated with cover-based combat.

Some people did actually use the mechanics from Dark Void in their games. The dogfighting for example is basically the aerial combat from a lot of games before and since (not that that's a bad thing), and Inversion was an example of a more recent shooter which tried the gravity-shifting thing again (from what I understand it didn't work out so well), but yeah, people are reluctant to try any of that stuff. I think designers would be more encouraged to do so if Dark Void had done well, but as with all AAA games it's also important to keep in mind the financial component. I can't imagine every publisher out there is going to fall head over heels at the proposition of making a shooter game with a bunch of unconventional mechanics that have had a history of failing in the past.