Dark Sector (PS3)

If while playing a game you’re reminded of sixteen random activities that you’d rather perform, and one or more of them involves collecting bodily fluids from various farm animals using only a paper cup and a straw, you’re playing a shitty game. If you’d rather remove the barnacles from the hull of a tuna trawler using your tongue, naked, with weeping sores over 90 percent of your body, you’re playing a shitty game. If in addition to the aforementioned activities you’d crawl on your lips through a minefield of broken glass and llama turds just to be rid of your shitty game, you’re playing Dark Sector, the third-person action shooter from publisher D3 and Canadian developer Digital Extremes.

While Dark Sector isn’t a horrible experience in itself, where it stumbles and eventually falls smack on its normal-mapped, uninspired mug is in its derivative nature. Everything about this game reeks of some other game, from its barely coherent story, to its hide-and-shoot gameplay, and its backdrop of Not-Quite-Demolished Homeliness Where Something Has Gone Terribly, Terribly Awry®. While I can appreciate a story that begins in media res, leaving the player to piece together just what’s going on through cleverly revealed story elements, Dark Sector’s story begins in media mess, with less effective characterization than the average Doritos billboard. Things only get worse from there.

You’ll play as Hayden Tenno, a generic and appropriately angst-filled government agent who appears to have leaped straight into the game all fresh and squeaky from the pages of Tiger Beat. Hayden is sent to the generic Soviet country of Lasria, to kill the generic heavy named Mezner who’s gotten his mitts on the generic zombification virus and is about to unleash it on the world just because he’s your average, run-of-the-mill evil twat. Hayden is quickly infected with the virus himself, which transforms his right arm into a collaborative Cuisinart Wham-O Backyard Kitchen Killing Machine, from which spins the coolest feature of the game, the glaive. Not only does it slice, dice, and julienne, but it entertains the neighborhood kids on a warm summer day. Go glaive.

Silence! I kill you!

Even the Frisbee o’ Dismemberment isn’t enough to redeem Dark Sector’s gameplay, which is so deeply mired in trigger events that it’s reminiscent of games we outgrew ten years ago. Killing all the magically spawning bad guys in a room until the door opens is something that might have been fun on the Playstation, but today it’s just frustrating and unnecessary. Developers need to find another way to pad the length of a game without resorting to such threadbare, dated tactics, and personally, I’d like to kick God of War squarely in the Anthonies for introducing the “rapidly press X/O/B/A” mechanic bullshit, which Dark Sector also uses. Button mashing is something that needs to follow in the footsteps of the decent single-player game and just fuckin’ die already.

While Dark Sector employs a simple economic system to allow Hayden to purchase black market weapons, the weapons are–presumably for the sake of balance and to force the use of the glaive–prohibitively expensive. Minor upgrades can be had for reasonable cost, but most players will find themselves sticking with the generic pistol and the glaive, which will upgrade by itself at set story points, earning new abilities such as the power throw, the shield, and aftertouch. Aftertouch is useful for steering the glaive to perform multiple kills and solving some of the game’s puzzles, including an early task of opening a switch on the opposite side of a locked fence, which was an entirely gratuitous and arbitrary use of the game’s lone saving grace.

Digital Extremes’ first-person shooter Pariah suffered from many of the same flaws, and though it wasn’t specifically bad, it felt more like an imitation of a good game than something you’d recommend on its own merit. Dark Sector is similar; though graphically impressive, in its attempts to wow us with one admittedly unique feature it ignores nearly everything else that makes a game memorable, including characterization, plot, action, and setting.

Give it a Friday night rental, and you’ll still be able to look at yourself in the mirror on Monday morning.

Tags: Action, Dull, PS3