- Title: Dark Sector
- Platform: Xbox 360
- Publisher: D3 Publisher
- Developer: Digital Extremes
- ESRB Rating: “M” for Mature
- Genre: Third-Person-Shooter
- Pros: The glaive is awesome; nice weapon/ability progression
- Cons: Average gameplay; bland level design; poorly told story
- Achievements: Reward you for playing normally.
Features
Dark Sector’s single-player game tells the story of Hayden Tenno, a black-ops agent sent into the fictional Eastern European country of Lasira to investigate a toxin that is turning people into zombies. Hayden gets infected, but rather than death and horrors it grants him special powers. The story past the introductory level is kind of bland and throws curveballs and twists at you that are never really explained so it is all just confusing. This is a game that succeeds purely on action and not storytelling. The SP will take you about ten hours to play through, but it is a deceptive ten hours. It is one of those games that doesn’t seem like it is taking that long, but you look at the clock and see 45 minutes to an hour has flashed by just on one level. I love games like that.
Dark Sector also has an online multiplayer mode. The two gametypes offer up some interesting scenarios where in one of them one player is Hayden and is trying to kill the other players playing as soldiers and in the other gametype each team has a Hayden and your objective is to kill the other team’s Hayden. Both games are fun, but playing as Hayden is definitely more fun than being a lowly, weak, underpowered soldier.
Gameplay
Dark Sector almost makes up for these downfalls thanks to the glaive. The glaive is a bladed weapon that acts like a boomerang. You also earn the ability to power throw, to guide it on its path in the air, and even give it elemental properties like electricity or fire. Using the glaive and decapitating enemies or cutting their arms off is awesome and really gives the game a fresh feel.
Aside from the glaive, however, Dark Sector has kind of a repetitive and all too familiar core. We have done a lot of this before in other games, and it has a decidedly average feel in Dark Sector. It’s not bad, just not great either. It is worth playing though once, but don’t expect anything revolutionary.
Graphics and Sound
The graphics are good, but not overly impressive. The characters look good and the levels are fairly detailed and nice looking even though they are linear and all have the same sort of feel. But the whole game has that way too shiny “next-gen” look that we saw on Xbox 360 games for the first year or so after the Xbox 360’s release. If it were released during that time, it would have been an absolute stunner. But most developers have moved past their “make everything shiny” phase at this point.The sound is good all around. Good music and sound effects and the voice acting is decent. Sound effects for enemies stand out in particular and make them seem very frightening even if they might not be that tough.
Bottom Line
