Not even worth a glance
Please note, I did not finish this game. I know it's a faux pas to write a review for a game you didn't finish but I'll explain why.
Darklight Conflict, on the surface, looks fun. It's got some nicely done box art, and I'm a big fan of space dogfighters so it looked right up my alley. Beauty, however, is only skin deep.
The game starts with a mandatory, unskippable series of tutorial levels. They start with basic movement and later get into subweapons. They are rather thorough even if they don't explain what each of the subweapons' purpose is. The game plays like a cheap Wing Commander. You see your ship exiting a carrier at the start of a mission, you go through jumpgates to travel between objectives, and then you land your ship by flying it back into the hanger bay on the carrier.
The graphics are decent enough, with some pretty good lighting but crappy sprite-based explosions. The sounds, though, are all pretty flimsy. The layout of the controls are relatively logical for a console space dogfighter but the movement of the ship feels incredibly imprecise due to how fast it turns. Hold down one of the directionals and you'll spin yourself into sickness. It gives the game the feeling of faster action than it actually has but without a method of locking on to opponents you're stuck spinning until you see them and spraying weapon fire at them till you manage to score enough hits to kill them. When you enter a jumpgate you sometimes have to play a minigame involving flying to little particles of one color while avoid the particles of another color. It's never explained how or why this happens. The HUD features three arrows intended to help you find your next objective. One points to the nearest enemy, one points to the nearest jumpgate, and the third points to the nearest friendly. Why they couldn't have used just one arrow and colored it differently for each purpose is beyond me. It was rare when more than one arrow was lit up at a time.
Between missions is where Darklight Conflict really fails. Darklight Conflict cannot save your game. That's right, a PSX game that still uses passwords and has no option for memory card save. Even worse, once you fail a mission, you're presented with an "enter your initials" screen, then you're shown the top scores, then it dumps you back to the main menu. If you didn't write down each password between missions, you get to do them all over again.
This is where I threw in the towel on Darklight Conflict. I can forgive the lame sounds and the rote gameplay but at the end of a mission I accidentally overshot the carrier's hanger bay and managed to collide with it, which resulted in my instant death (from full health no less). Since I wasn't writing down every password, the game gave me a big middle finger and told me to do it all over again. No thanks.
If you've got a hankering for some space action, there are plenty of better games out there. You're better off trying to see every ending to Colony Wars than playing this mess.