“With great power, comes great responsibility” is what I think I was supposed to gather from Dark Sector, Digital Extreme’s new super-powered and superhuman third-person action game. The title has been a long time coming – four years to be exact – and at times its existence only as a shiny tech demo led to questions as to whether or not there was an actual game there. It wasn’t surprising to hear that while playing around with their impressive engine, a designer at the studio accidentally impaled an enemy with a device meant for grabbing objects from afar – blood, guts and mayhem ensued – and the glaive was born. This three bladed boomerang and harbinger of death decapitates limbs like a hot knife through butter and it became the entire focus of the meandering Dark Sector – luckily it’s also the games saving grace.

Dark Sector is supposed to be a superhero saga, although saga may be a generous term. You play as Hayden Tenno; CIA operative and an attempt at creating an antihero with a Fallout Boy look – whoever thought of that as the epitome of dark and brooding needs a reality check. The game opens with Hayden embodying his appearance – whining about being on a mission in Lasria, a Soviet bloc state somewhere in Eastern Europe. He’s crying crocodile tears because Lasria is full of metal encrusted zombies and the virus that created them might be airborne. Maybe I’m being hard on our protagonist, but for this CIA operative it’s either grow some cojones or become zombie meat.

Oddly enough, both happen within the game’s first fifteen minutes: the virus infects his arm and it becomes a nasty fleshy mess, but for some reason (which I’m still unsure of) Hayden fights off any notion of eating brains and the infection becomes the cojones of Dark Sector – from his powerful infected metallic arm sprouts the glaive.

The narrative is pulled straight from a made for TV sci-fi movie, complete with a random old European man, a lover from Hayden’s past and a crazed antagonist with a British accent – it’s all completely forgettable. The basics that you need to know: Hayden is responsible for savings lots of folks and atoning for bad (and unelaborated upon) stuff in his past. And more importantly: his newly infected body grows more powerful as the virus spreads, and in turn, you’ll be treated to neat powers to play around with throughout the game.

Slicing up zombies with the glaive is a blast

The prologue arms you only with a pistol; players of Gears of War will feel immediately at home. Dark Sector copies and pastes the cover based gunplay from Epic’s shooter note for note – too bad it can’t play the music. Aiming is wonky at first and takes a while to get used to – it also lacks the intensity, weight and polish that made Gears so great. The “roadie run” makes an appearance as well, but it’s more of a delicate glide – matching Mr. Tenno’s meek demeanor – when compared to the chaotic gallop of Gears.

Thankfully for Dark Sector, this mediocre gunplay is only the focus for about fifteen minutes, because after the infection, it is all about the glaive.

Again, it’s best to describe this extension of Hayden’s body as a boomerang (or the Krull, if you grew up in the eighties) – throw it with the right bumper, let it slice and dice and it will always come back to your hand, ready to go again. While the rotating blade is making its rounds, claiming limbs and victims, you can shoot your pistol to finish off any stragglers – no assault rifles or shotguns while the glaive is out and about. There is great a rhythm to combat found in letting the glaive loose, capping some heads, rolling to another place for cover, and always finding it back in your grasp.

There are series of special abilities that are unlocked as you progress. The first is a power throw that has you do a timed toss of the glaive (think Gears’ active reloads) and if done correctly it will glow yellow, meaning it deals four times the regular damage. The second is the “aftertouch” which lets you guide the glaive around with the analog stick (or sixaxis on PS3) and it gives precision to ranged combat as well as encourages you to kill in wild angles that you wouldn’t think were possible. Another is the glaive’s ability to absorb elements (fire, ice, electricity) and use them in combat, also key in solving some very simple environmental puzzles. The last (and the least of them) is a shield, invisibility and grabbing objects at long range – they don’t do much in the way of mixing up gameplay, but serve their purpose in making you feel powerful.

Other aspects of Dark Sector don’t fare quite as well as the combat mechanics. Human enemies have brains, but they aren’t the sharpest tools in the A.I shed. And the zombies are… zombies through and through. But since when has a flight of stairs or a doorway ever stopped the brain eating mutants? A lot of the time when you pass an entryway to a room or courtyard, the minds of the enemies that are pursuing you simply turn off. What they are waiting for, I have no idea… maybe they just want a helping hand up some stairs, but I didn’t stop to care – I was too busy throwing the glaive at their stupid motionless faces.

Boss battles also rear their confusing head several times throughout the game. Now, I am not against a difficult boss, one that takes time to think about and defeat – if done well, boss battles can improve a sagging level dramatically. “What are its weaknesses?” and “where should the focus of attack begin?” are excellent questions to have during a boss fight; in Dark Sector my questions were mainly “what the hell am I doing?” and “how am I supposed to know I am doing this right?”. There are no visual clues to let you know if your methods are effective (a giant beast can’t look a little hurt each time I attack it in the proper fashion?) and it breaks down into a frustrating mess of shooting rockets and throwing the glaive at the giant enemies for almost ten minutes straight.

Most of the action takes place in courtyards… lots of courtyards. Level designs get repetitive within the first couple of hours of playtime and there isn’t a single memorable locale for the rest of the eight to ten hour game – it all looks and plays exactly the same. Even worse, what’s repeated isn’t particularly good. You will often find yourself in a corner of a map thinking that the excessive nooks and crannies have a point – they don’t. Levels designs are pointlessly large and empty or completely predictable and claustrophobic. It’s been there done that, and none of it plays or looks very interesting.

But that isn’t to say Dark Sector doesn’t look good, on the contrary. Digital Extremes poured many hours into their proprietary engine and it shows; on a technical level Dark Sector trumps everything else out there. You might mistake it at first as the Unreal III Engine because of its gray, brown, derivative style but watch it for a couple of minutes and you’ll realize that no Unreal Engine game has ever had textures as sharp, lighting as impressive or frame rates as silky smooth – it’s a shame that there is such sparse variety to it all.

It may be technically impressive, but a sense of deja vu creeps up very quickly

On the audio front, Dark Sector impresses as well. The score (although slightly cyclical) is quite good and the voice acting performances from the leads are mostly strong – even if they are speaking a bunch of nonsense. Ambiance and combat are mixed well; nothing can trump the whoosh of the flying glaive and the cries of your enemies as they drop to the ground in halves.

There is a limited Multiplayer offering in the form of Infection and Epidemic, but serious balancing issues keep it from treading on Gears of War’s turf. Infection pits one player as Hayden against (up to nine) regular foot soldiers and if it weren’t for a completely broken melee system, it might have worked. On multiple occasions I downed Hayden and the B button prompt came up (brutal close quarters finisher!), but it doesn’t work half the time and usually some other player will come along and snatch up your rightfully deserved kill (and the chances of becoming the next glaive wielder). Epidemic fares better and has two teams square off, each with their own single glaive wielder and the match ends whenever either of them are killed. But it also suffers from the same broken melee system. Until a patch of some kind comes out, multiplayer is mostly a throwaway.

Even with a heap of problems Dark Sector is still a good game. It rips off a plethora of design choices from plenty of other titles and doesn’t capture the magic of any of them, but it does the basics decently. The little bit of magic that Dark Sector does have is in its combat and more simply, the glaive. The rhythm of the pistol with the tossing of the bladed disc, power throws decapitating a couple enemies at a time and leaving soldiers in a shower of fire can’t be beat. Digital Extremes were most definitely searching for the voice of Dark Sector and they found it in the glaive.

Unfortunately, outside of the combat the game doesn’t have any original spark: levels are repetitive, boss fights are weak, the overall the style is completely average and the narrative is ridiculous. It does have the makings of a great game, but when you have one brilliant idea like the glaive it’s beneficial to further that innovation and polish into other aspects of the experience – it’s what ultimately separates great games from the good games.

(played on Xbox 360)

Presentation 7/10

Gameplay 7/10

Graphics 9/10

Audio 8/10

Value 6/10

Overall 7/10

Popularity: 25% [?]