6) Dark Void (2010)

Released in 2010 as the debut game by studio Airtight Games, Dark Void is a third-person shooter set in the lead up to World War II. This is a game that I don't remember hearing much about when it released, and vaguely recall seeing its boxart as I browsed for other games. Still, something about this game called to me, so given the mission statement of my self-imposed challenge, I decided, what the Hell, and gave it a shot.

I had no idea what to expect going into this experience, and judging from the boxart and promotional screenshots, expected a knockoff Rocketeer. Turns out, yeah, that's more or less what you get. You play as William Augustus Grey, a cargo pilot tasked with flying a shipment with his ex-girlfriend. Their plane crashes in the Bermuda Triangle, because of course it does, where they encounter aliens. After some light exploration, we meet a small group of humans who have survived in the titular dark void. Among them is Nikola Tesla, because sure, why not? The Void is a sort of middle ground, connecting Earth to the alien homeworld, because sure, why not? Soon after, we, the players, discover that the aliens, known as the Watchers, are capable of shape shifting, which somehow hasn't completely solved the conflict.

It turns out that Will's ex-girlfriend knows Nikola, and about the Watchers and the Void. In flashbacks, we see that one of the primary reasons the couple broke up is that Will wasn't willing to commit to joining her in what he thought was just the build-up to World War II, but was actually an alien resistance that she conveniently doesn't tell him about. Kind of seems like a big thing to not mention, but okay. So, the Watchers, who are capable of interdimensional travel and shapeshifting, have been supplying the Axis powers with wartime provisions for reasons that remain largely unknown. I guess they, being the bad guys, wanted to help supply other bad guys, with the ultimate goal of... I don't know, world domination? Look, I'll be honest, I kind of stopped paying attention around the point that we were fighting aliens in the Bermuda Triangle.

Mechanically, most of the game is spent on foot with standard cover shooter gameplay, only made interesting with the addition of a jetpack that mostly serves to allow verticality to the cover shooter formula. Hilariously, the most satisfying way to fight, at least for me, is to run in and melee the enemies. For a lot of enemies, it's an incredibly efficient method of dealing with them. The actual flying sections of gameplay, which is heavily used in the marketing, take up very little of the runtime. Still, the flight mechanics are intuitive and fun. Perhaps it's the crotchety old gamer in me, but I tend to be wary of flight sections in games. I've been hurt too many times before.

Overall, I think Dark Void would be the definition of a 6/10 game. Maybe a 7 on a good day. The few things it tries, it pulls off well enough, though I always found myself wanting just a little bit more. Outside of the plot, which is equal parts poor man's Rocketeer and poor man's Uncharted, the game doesn't do anything blatantly offensive nor particularly noteworthy. There is one stage in the game that is far more difficult than the rest that I did get stuck on. I failed probably a dozen times before searching online, only to discover that, yeah, no, that part sucks. The only advice I could find was to turn down the difficulty for that stage, then crank it back up after. That really should be a red flag, but when the rest of the experience is so utterly forgettable, it's hard to even care. Hilariously, the story leaves itself open for a sequel, which is just so fucking optimistic, that it actually makes me feel bad to know that the studio would close only four years later.