Goatmoose

Dark Sector is one of those titles that a lot of people heard about but didn’t play. At least that’s true for the people I associate with on a daily basis. Many know of it, some even own it, but none have ever played it. Of course, my small group of associates is a perfect reflection of the entire human race, so clearly this game was missed by the masses.

I got this game knowing nothing about it. Nuffin. I still don’t know much about it, as the story is pretty silly… something about a virus causing everyone to turn into a zombie-ish killing machine. You get some virus into your own body, and it turns your one arm into a freaky weapon of torment that you use to slay fiends. You play as a CIA guy who questions the motives of the people above him, gets double crossed; you know, your typical cliches. There is a lot of darkness, and oh so many sectors…

Your character’s name is Hayden. Like Hayden Fox, though not a coach, and not Craig T. Nelson. Like Hayden Panettiere, though much less cute. LIke Hayden Christiensen, though much… yeah, like Hayden Christiensen.

The game is a third-person action shooter with controls and gameplay much like that of Gears of War. It has that same weird camera angle when you run. You spend most of your fighting time behind cover, popping out to take down some foes before advancing to the next spot. It’s linear, it’s mindless, and it can be a pretty decent batch of fun. It can also be stupid and a hideous pain in the coccyx.

One thing very unique from Gears of War, and the highlight of Dark Sector, is the glaive. What is a glaive? Let’s not kid ourselves, here – it’s a boomerang. But, this isn’t any old red plastic boomerang that your little brother Timmy got stuck in Mr. Henson’s rosebush when you were six. This is a sharp, controllable weapon of doom that enjoys whizzing through the air and removing limbs from fellows unfortunate enough to step in its oblong path of treachery. It’s also become part of Hayden’s arm. Fashion a sleeve to cover that, Tim Gunn.

The glaive does bring a unique bit of gameplay, though. As you go through the levels, your powers change and give you new abilities. Eventually, you’re using your glaive to take out hordes, piloting it in slow-motion for super targeting, and power-throwing it at kneecaps. You have to give it elemental effects – fire, ice and electricity – both to get through the universe and for super cool ways of taking baddies down. The glaive takes some getting used to, but without it, this game would be garbage. There are guns, but they’re meh. Any gun you pick up off the ground only works for about 20 seconds, so you’re forced to conserve the ammo you find for your own guns. An upgrade system exists where you buy weapons, parts, etc. – but it’s fairly useless and doesn’t show up til several levels in, from which point you can avoid it entirely aside from maybe one or two purchases/upgrades. It takes place in a sewer, and is called the black market…. wooooEEEEoooo. I suppose that all makes it more… dark. And more sector.

The AI can be flat out dumb. Sometimes they’re brutally hard, sometimes they just stand there. The way Hayden responds to the world can be equally as dumb. Basically, if your gun can target an enemy, you can shoot it – even if the angles are all wrong. Sometimes you’ll be clearly behind cover and capable of shooting someone, despite your gun pointing at the wall you are against. There is also a low variety of enemies in the game. There are howlers, stingers, chromas, and soldiers. They’ll come in different, stronger varieties as you move through, but they’re all the same beasts.

The structure of the chapters is also a mess. There are 10 total. Some of them take 20 minutes to get through, others take 2 hours. There’s just no logic to the structure, and that annoys me.

Boss battles are overall pretty simple. While the bosses might kill you a couple times initially, they are super predictable and after a few deaths you’ve got them all figured out. One near the end took about 30 minutes, and about 28 minutes of that time was running around and rolling on the floor to dodge its attacks. You can only hurt it for a few moments, and you have to wait for those few and far between moments to arrive. What a snooze. At least you get an unreasonably high number of achievement points for killing each boss, as well as for everything else. I finished the game with 670, never played online, and there were another 50 or so points worth that I could have managed on that first playthrough if I cared enough.

I don’t think there is much replay value in this title, both because there just isn’t any, and because you won’t really want to play it again for quite a while. It’s fun, but not that fun. It’s clever, but not very. It’s really just a dumb game that is entertaining on a basic level, has good graphics, steals a lot of high points from Gears, and is worth renting. You can purchase it if you want, but for no more than $10-15.