my janky capture setup is a combination of Elgato HD capture and OBS. Elgato doesn’t release drivers for Mac so OBS won’t recognize it. I might try with my surface pro instead. Reason i need OBS is because the screenshot key in Elgato’s software is like 3 keypresses and with OBS you can bind any action to any hot key. Also mac’s file system UI sucks.
so. Dark Void
Rudy’s post made me think the game would get to the jetpack stuff soon and you do indeed get a jetpack
Anyway, Telsa will build you an airplane if you find enough airplane parts. so now you have to traverse the jungles again but with a jetpack. I assumed that if you added a jetpack to the mix that things would get exciting, but no. I was imagining a western made gunvalkyrie for some reason.
the shooting is tedious. Aside from running at 30 (15?) frames a second, tracking targets is really difficult. so many times I miss. The game does have a very light aim assist but it doesn’t do very well. The endless swarms of the same robots don’t help. This game commits the cardinal sin of making upgrade point pickups disappear if you don’t grab them fast enough. The game also give you weapon upgrade lockers more frequently than you’d ever upgrade. I manage to finally upgrade the main machinegun once and the power difference is negligible. At some point I pick up an alien grenade launcher and that makes some combat a bit easier.
another one of this game’s sins is the “press X to not die” quicktime event. which shows up. I have no idea why this persisted for so long, everyone hated it. What were game designers doing in the mid to late 00s?
every combat encounter is a slog. Enemies take too long to die, there’s too many of them, shooting them is a hassle, they look unintimidating, their gun blasts are annoying. etc
One problem with the jetpack is its mainly for gliding. You can gain some initial height from it but you just slowly fall. In one sequence you use it to glide down a very very long chasm. I think they meant to have enemies here but maybe they cut it because reasons? it takes like 3 full minutes to slowly glide all the way down.
another thing is you can glide off a cliff, but you can’t turn the jetpack off to die faster, so you just have to sit and wait until you glide down to the killplane.
Remember Uncharted? well it’s back
I hate this generic protagonist. He’s based off Nathan Drake, who is based off Nathan Fillion. So he’s basically watered down twice. Whenever he’s in peril in a cutscene I just mutter “die, die, die” over and over. During the early part of the first mission he has a radio conversation with the woman about how they broke up.
Well we get the shit and go back to the village. Village is under attack from robots, and I’m like “why does the game depict indigenous people as if they’re stupid, one dimentional, and helpless?” well now we gotta kill the robots, again, because they also stole our ex girlfriend.
“I’m getting pretty tired of this” the protagonist mutters during the 400000th gunfight. Me too buddy.
Like I just hate this shit dawg. I think with a mouse and keyboard and at 60fps it would be less miserable but the thing just plays like molassas. These dark Mayan inspired corridors feel like a PS2 game.
Anyway we get to another big fight which I die several times because there’s zero cover and a zillion enemies around. One of the villagers is there to help so that’s nice. I still don’t have enough to upgrade my main gun to the highest level so the encounter takes a billion years to do.
A cutscene where my capture setup stops working, but soon our fucking hero finds Tesla’s secret other jetpack, which actually lets you fly. Then there’s a tutorial level where you fly around in the jetpack, and it’s pretty nice.
I’m going to pretend it’s 2008, I’m going to pretend I’m a consultant from Capcom and I’m playing a rough demo of Dark Void at Airtights offices. I’m going to pretend i played through all that and got to the jetpack section after several hours of playing through 3rd person garbage.
“Ok here’s what you’re going to do: you’re going to cut all of the 3rd person Gears of War garbage. This is a jetpack flying game now. you should spend 75% of the game flying the jetpack. You should start with the jetpack. You should stay with the jetpack. All levels are these open area flying levels. Maybe you once in a while land and run into an area and shoot some stuff on foot. Add multiplayer flying and shooting, even if it sucks. Do not start the game with jetpacks then make the players crawl through the mud for several hours to get back to it” and yeah I am taking several liberties here with the realities of game production but I can see a version of this game that/s 7/10 instead of 5/10. Perhaps this game was a huge jetpack game and Capcom insisted they add Uncharted and Gears Of War garbage to it to stay “competitive”
I might jump back in and try the jetpack levels because the last sections were a total slog. I worry that the game will also go back to Gears Of War garbage again, and if it does I may just quit out. I will need a better capture setup though too.
