Imagine that you're with your buddies, and you all come up with a great idea: Build the best hangout possible in your rich friend's basement. All the set pieces are obvious: Big Screen HDTV, full-service bar with kegerator stored underneath, sports and music memorabilia plastered on the walls, a surround-sound stereo system hooked up to a PC for party music, and some lush furniture for people to come relax and have a good time. And your rich friend gave you approval! Sweet! But, he only gives you a small budget and a short time frame to get it done. Also, the bar can only hold the cheap, crappy beer that only he enjoys, the walls can only be decorated with memorabilia of a sports team that everyone hates, and the only music allowed to be played is Bronkencyde on an endless loop (that link is Not Safe For Sanity, by the way). This is a lot like how Dark Void plays.

Dark Void takes a really neat idea and tries as hard as it can to make it work. Unfortunately, what good it has is brought down to the ground crashing in the process--hard. Simple gameplay errors and some careless lack of polish bring this game out of the sky and into the bargain bin faster than you can say "Nikola Tesla is like 80 years old in this game and yet he looks like he's 45."

What makes Dark Void such an interesting project is its creative mix of combat transition. After getting the iconic jet pack, your character can seamlessly go from traditional ground combat (find cover, advance forward) to air combat (hover above to get tactical advantages or take the fight to the sky entirely). At first, this kind of fight is rewarding for the mix of strategies one can use to advance the game or figure out new ways to take down old enemies.

That's at first. What you'll probably end up doing is try to keep the fight on the ground, since air combat controls are so unbalanced and awkward that they're actually dreadful to enact. The left bumper locks the camera onto a target, but it's basically useless because your character does not automatically move to compensate for this. The right stick changes the angle of your character but doesn't actually move him--making barrel rolls not only common, but useless. You can hijack enemy aircrafts and take control of them, but the control problems remain and you have to play a boring and lengthy minigame to complete it. Considering that your jetpack's on-board guns deal enough damage as it is and never run out of ammo, there's almost no reason to try anything else.

When you are on the ground, however, the game likes to occassionally throw some curveballs your way. Ground combat is pretty standard if you've ever played Gears of War or just about any other 3rd Person Shooter made in the last five years or so: Find cover, retreat to magically recharge health, kill each enemy one by one. But it sometimes likes to play with the aerial theme present in the game's air combat by offering vertical combat situations. Using floors and platforms as cover, the game takes the standard combat and literally flips it, making it an up-and-down fight. These are very fun, but become obsolete to do once you're gotten the jet pack since you can just fly past everything without fear of death.

Regardless of how you fight, you'll be using one of a small handful of weapons throughout the game. None of the weapons really differentiate between one another in terms of tactical use or damage output, but your fists are a different story. Melee attacks are by far the most powerful in the game, since they can take down most enemies in less than two hits (and a vast majority are one-hit kills). Like in Rogue Warrior, melee kills have neat animations but start to repeat themselves after you've used enough of them. Combat, overall, is a dull experience.

Also like Rogue Warrior, there's a terrible plot backed by good voice acting. Nolan North--the man behind the voice of Nathan Drake of Uncharted and Desmond Miles of Assassin's Creed fame--does the voice for Will, the main character, and most of the voice acting is very good. The only downside to this is that the writing and animation are so bad that they manage to ruin the talent of these actors, turning them into one-dimensional vessels. The plot itself is generic sci-fi at best, and terrible alternate history fan fiction at worst. Basically, there's an alien race trying to enslave Earth and Will is the only one who can stop them while he tries to figure out if his old girlfriend still has feelings for him. Some of the early levels are combat-less plot levels, so it's not only boring to go through, but it's disheartening to get an achivement for basically pushing the left stick forward for a few minutes.

And honestly, if the game takes place at the beginning of World War II, how does Nikola Tesla look and move as though he were 40 years younger? There are certainly more holes than this in the game, but this is the one that really took me out of it completely. Dark Void seems like it wants to be taken seriously, but it's hard to do this when the suspension of belief has been thrown out the window entirely.

The lack of polish is highly evident in the core game as well. Invisible walls clutter the landscape, hindering movement at times when it could be most useful. Enemies will sometimes forget your existence entirely and just walk away as though nothing's wrong. Piloting a turret is impossible because the game's camera will constantly move downard, so much that you will actually be aiming upside down and away from the action. I once chased an enemy aircraft for a good ten seconds and got it to crash straight into a mountain. There's a lot of lag when the game really kicks into gear (PC versions are likely safe from this, though I played the game on 360 and caught word that the PS3 version has a lot of lag as well), and sometimes it gets so bad that the game will crash and you'll have to do a hard restart.

If there was one word to describe Dark Void, it would be "unfinished." The project seems like it was rushed out the door without much QA to support it and not nearly enough review to make it playable. A few more months of developement and debugging would have greatly improved this game, but as it stands, the entire package comes pretty short when trying to justify a $60 US purchase. With a ten-hour campaign and no multiplayer, there really isn't a whole lot to see here other than a buggy, nonsensical mess of a single-player mode. If you're honestly craving for something new after the huge pile of games that were released during the Holiday season, and you can't wait a few weeks for the huge pile of games coming soon, you can give this a rental and call it a weekend, because Dark Void is lacking and forgettable.

Sure beats listening to Brokencyde...but then again what isn't?