For my money and speaking completely on a personal level, Dark Sector is everything I was hoping last holiday season’s The Darkness would be, but without all the profuse profanity. Set is a slightly more military setting, rather than an urban underworld, Dark Sector is a disturbing tale of a deadly … something that seems bent on taking lives and destroying property.
The game begins with a story sequence set in Russia, in which a submarine surfaces mysteriously and, when the military investigates… oops, the screen goes dark and jumps forward in time, so exactly what happened is a bit of a mystery, at least for a while. The future jumped ahead to begins at a military base that looks like the site of post-nuclear devastation.
You are on a mission to find and eliminate some folks captured by enemy forces; you’re more of a black-ops guy than a hero, because you eliminate friendly targets more often than rescue them. In the early going, my favorite sequence has you quickly eliminating some human targets, but then scrambling to bring down a seemingly-unstoppable helicopter attack.
The game also seems to have some random weirdness; at one point, as I was attacking some enemy units, suddenly this big … I don’t know, energy monster … struck and cleaned house on them for me. Of course, if I attacked it, it was perfectly happy to eliminate me, too, but I found out that if I could dodge and hide long enough, it would lose interest and disappear. Either that was a huge hole in the AI, or something the developer tossed in just to see how different approaches to the threat would work out, if it wasn’t too tightly scripted.
While you initially get access to traditional weaponry, soon you become “infected” with something that seems both viral and alien; it turns you part cyborg and gives you a kick-butt bladed weapon that rips opponents to shreds in a fairly bloody manner. The origin of this infection remains a mystery for a while in the game, so it’s not clear whether it’s really alien technology, something mystical, or perhaps even a case of Phentermine overdosing. Also note that the sound effects guy on this title is one twisted puppy; every time you kill an opponent with the blade, there are some extended and very painful-sounding death-rattles sprinkled into the mix.
The battle system is a mild variation on the standard action-shooter formula and is quite effective. The damage system is not communicated through a HUD, but when you’re getting near death, the screen goes red around the edges. Fortunately, if you can take cover and avoid additional damage for a brief period of time, you’ll soon heal up.
Brimming with action and energy, Dark Sector is one of the few action-shooter-stealth games that captured my attention. The dialog isn’t as profanity-infested as The Darkness, which is a good thing, because the game is both playable and addictive. While not quite on the same level as Metal Gear Solid 4, Dark Sector is an enjoyable diversion with some sharp graphics.
