Dismemberment & Disappointment

Dark Sector is a game I had very high hopes for. I named it as a potential sleeper in one of my hidden gems articles and couldn’t wait to explore the sheer brutality and bleak environments that were received with such horror in Australia. The game was delayed and heavily censored in that part of the world. The real question I was pondering was if Dark Sector had substance or just shock value, and I’m still not too sure of the answer.

The first thing that stood out to me whilst playing was in the very first cut-scene. Dark Sector features a strange mechanic that allows you to move the camera about an inch each way during the cinematic. I thought perhaps there would be a point to this, but throughout the whole game it felt like it was just there to give you a bit of a headache and keep your thumbs busy on the analog sticks. The scene also surprised me a lot due to the graphics, which reminded me of mid 2000’s PS2 games, and this game came out around the same time as TES IV: Oblivion, which while not necessarily pretty by today’s standards, was a hell of an upgrade from the PS2. The opening cut-scene also gets you started on the storyline of the game, which is a fault in itself. No matter how much I tried, I just couldn’t get invested in any of the characters, they were all extremely bland and really lacked any sort of development. The voice acting is performed by generic Americans with mouths full of gravel, sounding gritty and at points impossible to decipher, almost as if the cookie monster had throat cancer. The cast aren’t the worst offenders though, as the dialogue is so horribly written. One line that really stood out to me was ‘When did you start thinking about anyone other than yourself?’ which was responded to with ‘I don’t know’. It’s laughably applaudable.

At it’s heart, Dark Sector really wants to be a cover based third-person shooter, but due to a tremendous shortage of ammunition in the game you’ll spend most of the time treating it as, well, a cover based hack n’ slash. The game does feature a large variety of weapons, and you can purchase, sell and upgrade them in the game’s ‘Black Market’ sections, increasing their stats with things such as stopping power and fire rate boosts. The upgrades cannot be bought, the only way to acquire them is to come across them in-game. You also need to sell your weapon and buy it again if you want to change the upgrades, as they’re permanent on the weapon. Due to the scarcity of the game’s currency (Rubles) this is painstakingly expensive and a complete waste of time given the power of the glaive.

The glaive is accessible from the second chapter of the ten chapter long campaign. The majority of the time you will have the glaive in your right hand and a handgun of your choice in the second. I opted for the revolver so that I could swiftly finish foes without needing to wait for the glaive to circle its way back to me. If you’ve ever played Bethesda’s ‘Rage’ you will understand the glaive better than most, as it’s a wingstick. Rage did it better though, as it was 4 years on and they learnt a lot from this title. It isn’t a completely one-sided battle though as the glaive does a lot of things the wingstick doesn’t. You can charge it up with different elements to achieve different things such as clearing a path or opening a doorway. The elements can also be devastatingly harmful to your enemies, freezing them, shocking them or burning them to death. You can also perform brutal finishing moves on your foes, ripping their heads off or dismembering other parts of their bodies, you can even throw your glaive in sow motion and navigate it to tear the torso off the legs of a nearby soldier.

The enemies have a lot of variety, from standard foot-soldiers to more versatile zombie-like foes. There are also those who have been enhanced to turn invisible or fire lasers at you. None of them are too difficult though, and it’s pretty easy to run through some of the earlier levels without a scratch. There are also mini-bosses though, who require very specific ways to be killed, which can be really frustrating and feel really repetitive. The bosses are a little more interesting, but are reused multiple times throughout the game. There was one boss I had extreme difficulty with, as it can turn invisible and kill you in one hit, causing for a tonne of obscenities to be yelled at my TV screen. Dark Sector doesn’t feature any difficulty settings, and it proves to be really difficult towards the end of the game. Some of the games chapters are really long but others lack substance and can be completed in just shy of twenty minutes, making for an incredibly uneven game with some missions too short and some too long.

I wouldn’t describe Dark Sector as a hidden gem or even a gem, but it was a few hours of fun. I don’t believe I’ll be picking it up again to play as there’s no replayability other than the online modes and the online community seems to be dead.

6.5/10

Conclusion

‘If you’re after a few kills that make you go “Fuuuuuuck” then you’ll get a bit of that here and there, just don’t bother trying to get invested in anything else, this game is purely gameplay and even that’s questionable’.