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Glaives of Fire: Dark Sector Invades Consoles (Page 2 of 5)
- July 07, 2008 11:43 AM PST
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Crowd Control
Sometimes disabling an enemy is preferable to simply destroying it...
As cool as these ideas are, they're held back by level designs that don't take full advantage of your abilities. With a few exceptions, Dark Sector is a long sequence of corridors, rooms, and plazas featuring nearly identical encounters with utterly predictable enemies. Howlers charge with no particular intelligence, and picking off Hazmat troopers is little more than a high-tech version of whack-a-mole. Even more interesting variants like Heavy Troopers and cloaking Chromas adhere to rigidly mechanical and easily exploitable behavior. The hardest battles, like those against helicopters or a Stalker elder, are challenging only because a single hit almost always means sudden death.
The glaive is one of the coolest weapons I've seen in a long time, but combat feels more like an assembly line than an organically evolving battlefield. Add in a sporadically frustrating checkpoint system that sometimes requires you to survive battles against dozens of enemies that suddenly appear when you cross invisible line triggers, and the fact that your slickest abilities don't even appear until you're over halfway through the game, and playing with a single high-tech toy, however flexible, no longer seems entirely sufficient.
Kill the Carrier
Send your glaive hurtling in the right direction, and you can take off the legs, arms, and even heads of your foolish assailants.
The two multiplayer modes, which support ten players across just five maps, are enjoyable, but wholly uninspired. Infection pits one souped up player against the rest, but every successful kill starts the match from scratch, preventing any rhythm of intensity from developing. Epidemic splits the field into teams, each with a Hayden that pulls double duty as leader and target, but matches seldom last long enough to develop any tension. Such online incursions are entertaining in their simple way, but the glaive alone is unlikely to be enough to lure players away from the bigger online guns.
Dark Sector isn't a bad game but its considerable potential is squandered thanks to some iffy design decisions and inconsistent gameplay. The wonderfully adaptable glaive is cool enough that I'm rooting for an improved sequel, but I'm hoping the designers learn some lessons from their interesting but ultimately flawed first attempt.
PROS: Cool glaive weapon; solid variety of powers; reasonable upgrade system; atmospheric tone.CONS: Spreads powers out over too much time; bland level layouts; one-hit deaths; simple-minded enemies; checkpoint cheese; some control issues.
