I quite enjoyed this game I remember king of the of the rocket men when I was a child and I even had rocket ranger on the Amiga when I was a kid.
I was eager to play Dark Void because it has these elements and I was excited by the prospect of what the power of the PS3 could do to that kind of game. I was pleasantly surprised.
You play Will a freight plane transporter who will take anything from A to B at a cost. One day an old flame asks you to do her a favor and in the process he flies over and gets trapped in the Bermuda triangle also known as the Dark void. Which has its own set of enemies the watchers.
Obviously the key aspect of the game is the flight. Nothing I have played yet on the ps3 can quite compete with the feeling of flying into combat with a jet pack on your back; taking on flying saucers and other alien aircraft in a full on dog fight. To make things more interesting you can hijack the enemy aircraft and use their own aircraft against them which adds an extra element of variety to the tasks. Quite a lot of the hijacking is done in a similar vein to Prototype, if you have ever played that game it requires you to use a series of button presses to first get to the aircraft and then overpower the driver of the vehicle.
Another strong point of the game is the 3D physics engine, attacks can come from any angle, both when you are in the air and when you are on foot. There are some excellent sections for example when you look down and have shootouts over ledges and when you are flying up from ledge to ledge. The game truly is 3D and an enjoyable one at that.
I did find the controls to be a bit fiddly and a bit of trial and error, it takes just a bit too long to get used to them, once you do get used to them though you can pull off some incredible stunts and feel good in the process.
My major gripe with this game is the missions, you would think that coming of Capcom this game would be solid, but quite a lot of the earlier missions are just plain pointless and, to be frank a waste of time. I ended up asking myself why am I even doing this. The sad thing is some of these missions do not even push the story forward and so feel a bit like padding.
Another gripe that I had was that the combat engine did not feel complete, sometimes there are just so many annoying little firefights I just felt like sod this and I just charged in and went for the quick kills, in fact I ended up doing this a lot and succeeding on nearly every attempt. If that was in quantum of solace I would be dead. This just makes the shootouts pointless.
Where this game is let down on though is the storyline, it has to be said Capcom has to named and shamed. For most part the storyline is great and the cinematics of this game are excellent, you feel like you have been thrust into a situation you cannot understand, and you step into the character and believe in what you are doing but for some small parts the story line is atrocious. Come on Capcom, you are the developers of street fighter and Resident evil. Did you come up with these parts on your day off?
For the most part I found this game to be enjoyable and despite these faults still worth a foray into the Dark Void.