Dark Void

You can’t really yammer on about high story expectations from a game which hangs entirely on its quirky and unique gameplay. In Dark Void, it’s pretty obvious which element came first; the story tootles sadly on a rusty old penny whistle while the gameplay thrums relentlessly with unbowed orchestral majesty.

The square-jawed cliché – who for the sake of argument we’ll call Buck Meatbuster – being used in place of a central playable character is laughably inept at evoking even involuntary eyebrow movement as emotional recognition at anything he has to say. Equally, his love interest, who appears to have some untapped insight into the madness cascading through your TV screen, shares equal levels of personality with a shelf.

The lunatic excuse for a narrative begins with a plane crashing into a rain forest somewhere in South America, your first objective being to make it to a village that miss know-it-all clocked on the way down. This provides the first part of an incredibly drawn out string of tutorial levels that do absolutely nothing to enamour the player to the game’s charms. But it's reaching the village – a piece of running which seems to last approximately a week – where the narrative psychosis really takes hold.

Set during the second world war, a force of killer inter-dimensional cyborgs, at first suspected to be Nazis, are out to take over the world, beginning with an inexplicably 17th Century interpretation of indigenous South American tribes people whom said cyborgs hope will worship them as gods. Presumably they picked these anachronistic Mayans on the basis that they’re the kind of stereotypical tribal divs that would worship a peanut if it sat up and said anything. Whatever the reason, wearing full Mayan regalia – grassy pants, toothy talismans, pointy sticks and so on – they all speak in broad Californian accents as if someone forgot to actually brief the actors on what their on-screen avatars would look like in the final cut.

Luckily for you, up until the point when the cyborgs turned up, inventor of magic electricity, Nikola Tesla, has been the object of their deification and with all of the resources a rain forest naturally provides at his disposal, has constructed some hyper-advanced rocket packs – cue another tutorial in which you learn vertical gameplay and flying while arbitrarily scooping up aeroplane parts to no end whatsoever.

Eventually, you’ll find your way into the titular void and fight the cyborg threat on their home turf alongside a group of Jedi Adepts who just won’t stop hinting that you’re some kind of messianic beef-faced chosen one, prophesied to end the war by destroying the variously shaped cyborgs and… Jesus… does this actually exist or did we dream it?

But here’s the kicker; none of this matters. If you’re playing Dark Void for the sake of the story, you’re on a hiding to nothing. It manages, by the skin of its teeth, to glue one level to the next and to be absolutely honest, the more preposterous the the unfolding charade, the more entertaining it all becomes. And then there’s the gameplay.

It’s superb! The initial misgivings over the possible gimmick startus of the rocket-fuelled gameplay fall quickly by the wayside. It’s an invisible transition; one minute you’ll be huffing and puffing about yet another tutorial when somehow the surprise revelation leaps unexpectedly from the shadows and you find you’re suddenly having an unusually great time.

… continued