Final verdict: C-
Final playtime: 6 hours
I wish Digital Extremes had put more effort into Dark Sector. It could have been good, but as is it’s pretty average in general.
The game has its good aspects. It’s visually impressive and the engine seems generally solid. Using the glaive is satisfying and enjoyable, and it’s cool how you can rebound it off walls and floors in order to hit targets not directly accessible (though that requires patience and luck and you’ll get bored of trying to be clever and instead run up and break the enemy’s neck) but it gets old as you have to use it all the time without all that much variation. There’s no point in using any of the guns available in the game, as the glaive is your go-to weapon for both killing almost all of the game’s enemies (except for the big ones that give you RPG launchers and tell you “Please kill me with this convenient RPG launcher, I do not deserve an original or clever death”) and solving all of its puzzles. Also the guns explode a few seconds after you pick them up. You can buy guns of your own, but they’re expensive. I think that maybe, just maybe, they’d like you to just use the glaive.
While on the subject of puzzles, I’ll mention that you solve all of them in the same way: Throw glaive at puzzle. As you can imagine, they don’t take much thought, time or effort to solve.
Oh, right. I was supposed to be saying good things. Alright, look, what can I say? It looks nice, it has some good ideas. Its gameplay is straight out of Gears of War – that’s definitely not a bad thing. But, guys, come on. If you’re going to copy Gears of War then you could at least keep the same controls for the sake of familiarity.
The story seems interesting at first but takes a nose dive towards the end with the old “Surprise! Your boss was evil all along!”. But it doesn’t end there! It hits you with a double whammy with yet another classic twist: That girl from your past that you probably boned one time is the antagonist! Fuuuuuck! It also tries to be artistic – The game begins in grayscale, which at first made me think there may have been something wrong with my TV. As you progress though, Hayden becomes infected and the color kicks in to suggest that now his life has meaning. Woo.
Damn, I did it again. I say I’ll talk about good things but the bad things just keep slipping back in! I don’t think there are many more good things that can be said, though, so I guess I’ll begin the shit-throwing.
First of all, FUCK infinitely respawning zombies. FUCK infinitely respawning zombies in pitch black sewers. FUCK enemies that spawn behind you, in areas that you just cleared out. All of those things come under the umbrella term “God damned stupid bullshit”.
That’s it. That’s all there is to this game. You throw a fancy boomerang at the same enemies over and over, they die, you progress. The glaive is fun for a while but it gets dull fast. There’s very little variation in the enemies. The gameplay was good, but it was let down by unimaginative enemies and sheer repetitiveness.
Final playtime: 6 hours