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‘Dark Void’ an ambitious, gravity-defying shooter

As Will, the owner of a struggling cargo business in the 1930s, you set off in your plane from Nassau, Bahamas, to deliver some goods overseas. Hitting turbulence over the Atlantic, you suddenly realize you’ve entered the Bermuda Triangle, where you encounter a UFO. Your plane is thrown off course and crash-lands on a strange world — in a parallel universe — where you band together with other humans to fight off a powerful alien race known as the Watchers.

While the sci-fi premise of “Dark Void” isn’t unique — you might even roll your eyes when Will meets up with Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla early in the story (a cliche in this genre) — the game play is a refreshing blend of on-foot combat and aerial dogfighting, as Will dons a jetpack and takes to the unfriendly skies. This fusion works, for the most part, although dense enemy artificial intelligence and some camera issues mar the overall experience.

After a brief, vertigo-inducing tutorial on how to maneuver your jetback, you’ll spend the first hour or two on the ground and learn the basic combat mechanics in “Dark Void.” Like in other third-person shooters, you’ll walk or run through hostile environments, take cover behind walls and other objects, and fire at aliens using low- and high-tech weaponry. The first wave of Watchers you’ll encounter are robot-like fighters who also attempt to hide and shoot, but more often than not they let you hit them easily.

Things get more interesting, however, after discovering the game’s vertical missions. This starts with the ability to drop down steep cliff edges from one platform to another while pegging bad guys, and a few minutes later, while wearing your jetpack, soaring to treetops and mountain ledges. An on-screen prompt will show you when to press the Square button (on the Sony PlayStation 3 controller) or blue X button (on the Microsoft Xbox 360 gamepad) to drop or jump.

But the real fun in the game — if you don’t suffer from motion sickness — is flying and engaging in heated 360-degree midair battles against swarms of enemies, enemy ships or bigger and tougher boss characters. Even while you’re blazing the skies at high speeds and avoiding obstacles, you can target nearby threats by holding down the left trigger button while firing with the right one. It’s possible to become disoriented at times, but this freedom of movement proves liberating and exhilarating. You can even jump from one object to another in midair and skyjack a Watcher aircraft.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that “Dark Void” was developed by some of the team responsible for the intense aerial combat in the “Crimson Skies” games.

Despite some less-than-smart artificial intelligence, and some random camera issues where you might lose sight of your character or the firing enemies, “Dark Void” is a solid B-grade game that should satiate action fans in search of something different. The jetpack combat is the most thrilling of the game-play mechanics, and it’s too bad there’s no online option for multiplayer matches, but you won’t likely be disappointed with this ambitious, gravity-defying shooter.