Just finished playing “Dark Void”… When it came out, it wasn’t something I really needed to play, but I found it on the bargain bin and decided to give it a try…
Rant number one: DON’T PUT SPOILERS ABOUT THE STORY IN THE FLAVOUR TEXT ON THE LOADINGS!It’s just stupid and kind of ruins the game for people that actually enjoy being “surprised” by the story.
Anyway, having finished the game, I can’t help the feeling that the game was rushed, which is too bad. Given more time, the game could have actually been very good, instead of just average.
From a game mechanics standpoint, the game is the usual fare of 3rd person adventure games, but with some nifty things. It has a “vertical combat” mechanic that is actually fun and interesting, in which your characters is dangling on ledges and such and has to fight enemies. The other one is the main selling point of the game: the rocket-pack parts.
Most of it feels solid, although the level design borders on boring sometimes. For example, the hangar part reminds of the obnoxious “Library” level on Halo 1, being too long and the same from start to finish, without anything interesting happening (besides killing hordes of enemies, of course).
But where this game fails the most in the story-telling… they’ve created an interesting premise, with a lore-basis that might have been original, and then ruin it with basic storytelling (with basic storytelling mistakes)…
In the game, you play as a hot-shot pilot that has to ferry his once-lover to some place, for some reason (yep, it’s that detailed) and instead get sucked into the Bermuda Triangle that leads the player to another world… Not to spoil the game for anyone, stuff happens there… 
The basic plotline is paper thin, the cut-scenes are generic, converting what could be interesting characters into simplistic archetypes and hinting at a larger than life world outside, but never showing it, or letting it interfere with the game itself… Most of the game you spend your time going from place to place, doing things over a time span of supposed months, but nothing has actual bearing into your motivations… most of the time I didn’t know WHY I was doing things, although it was very clear WHAT I had to do.
And it’s a shame, really, because there are some visual details that are interesting (the Watcher’s “hair”, for example), but it gets lost into the usual “fight the minions of the real bad guys, which are actually robots because we don’t want to show blood”… and don’t get me started on the climatic finale, which the game has been gearing up since the start… it’s silly and inexplicable and introduces a plot hole the size of a small planet!
It feels like either the game was rushed, or without a solid direction from the narrative standpoint… the things it does badly (from generic characters with no charisma, to the use of the over-used Tesla as “science-guy”, the single black guy that speaks as if he’s just come from the middle of Africa, the pieces of “lore” that are dropped in the middle of the story, the list goes on forever) are basic ones that are covered in any narrative course!
And it’s too bad… the game disappoints because it has good concepts, we can see its potential and then it drops the ball almost continuously… 6/10