Ever find yourself playing a game and really enjoying it, but still having the nagging sense that if one or two things was done better it could have been spectacular?
Thanks to some recent bargain hunting, I'm currently playing a probably forgotten title by the name of Dark Sector. It was originally a title used to promote the PS3/360 era of gaming and blew many people away when first revealed, and then it sort of fell into development hell where it received a fairly drastic visual make over before being silently released into the wild. As I've been playing through it, I can't help but find myself thinking how nearly amazing it is.
Dark Sector has some jaw dropping environmental designs and lighting, accompanied by excellent sound design and music (which is sometimes only music in the Silent Hill sense). Gameplay is solid but unspectacular 3rd person yet it contains the brilliant glaive. The glaive is, in essence, a giant shuriken that functions as a boomerang. NESers can think of the windmill throwing star in Ninja Gaiden.. or, if you've ever seen the terrible movie Krull you know exactly what it is. Not only did the developers mix the glaive into the standard gunplay extremely well, but they also worked it into some fairly clever puzzle sequences involving charging the glaive with an element and psychically controlling it's movement mid flight. You also have a nice mix of combat between infected zombie like enemies and non infected intelligent soldiers.
Unfortunately, as said above, the 3rd person play doesn't really stand out and the cover system just doesn't feel as good as, say, Gears of War. Also, while the environments look stunning, the character models for both PC and NPC look just short of horrid. I'm not sure if even more development time would have helped in this case, but it's definitely a title for me that comes so close to spectacular but just falls short.
Thanks to some recent bargain hunting, I'm currently playing a probably forgotten title by the name of Dark Sector. It was originally a title used to promote the PS3/360 era of gaming and blew many people away when first revealed, and then it sort of fell into development hell where it received a fairly drastic visual make over before being silently released into the wild. As I've been playing through it, I can't help but find myself thinking how nearly amazing it is.
Dark Sector has some jaw dropping environmental designs and lighting, accompanied by excellent sound design and music (which is sometimes only music in the Silent Hill sense). Gameplay is solid but unspectacular 3rd person yet it contains the brilliant glaive. The glaive is, in essence, a giant shuriken that functions as a boomerang. NESers can think of the windmill throwing star in Ninja Gaiden.. or, if you've ever seen the terrible movie Krull you know exactly what it is. Not only did the developers mix the glaive into the standard gunplay extremely well, but they also worked it into some fairly clever puzzle sequences involving charging the glaive with an element and psychically controlling it's movement mid flight. You also have a nice mix of combat between infected zombie like enemies and non infected intelligent soldiers.
Unfortunately, as said above, the 3rd person play doesn't really stand out and the cover system just doesn't feel as good as, say, Gears of War. Also, while the environments look stunning, the character models for both PC and NPC look just short of horrid. I'm not sure if even more development time would have helped in this case, but it's definitely a title for me that comes so close to spectacular but just falls short.
