Dark Sector

[twmac]

Picked thsi up on the strength of D3 publishers and have to say that it is a pretty strong title.

Most of the cover system stuff is ripped off from Gears of War and even though the engine is supposed to be proprietry it looks an awful lot like the Unreal one. That said the glaive weapon is extremely good fun and there is plenty of visceral joy to be had by using aftertouch to slice through multiple enemies.

The monster and level design is solid and there are some great set pieces so far, the most notable is when you're in this fire fight with a bunch of storm trooper types and a huge beast jumps into view and takes on all of you.

Maybe it is because I've gotten too used to being pampered but I have to say that the approach to some of the boss battles verges on 16 bit. By this I mean that there are very few clues as to how to beat them and one guy (bi-pedal mech troop) I gave up and searched gamefaqs for the answer.

There is a demo on the 360 that shows you quite a few of the glaive powers (there are ones that you don't get until about level 4 or 5 that really rock) if you interested and need a game to play before the big uns in August and September.

[toblix]

Not to sidetrack or anything, but where do you people think today's commercial games are now on the scale from merciless games that require hundreds of hours of dedication to complete or master to games full of tutorials and popups and arrows pointing where to go next and all that?

For example, I hear there's a GPS in GTA4, which we discussed in another thread. Too much? Do you find yourself disabling stuff like this?

edit: I guess this is sidetracking.

[miffy495]

I remember reading some reviews for Dark Sector and being quite intrigued. I'm really not experiencing a dearth of things to play right now, but I'll definitely keep it in mind for the next time a drought hits, much like I did with The Darkness. It did look like a nice bit of fun.

It never really hits me how much easier games have gotten until I try playing something I used to be really good at on Virtual Console or the like. Compared to modern experiences (Ninja Gaiden and its contemporaries excluded) they're just so brutally difficult. That said, in a lot of cases the penalty for failure was less drastic as well. Start again 30 seconds ago with maybe a powerup gone, for example. (R-Type III, anyone?) For me it's most obvious in things like RTSes. Even ones from less than, or barely, a decade ago like Starcraft, Emperor: Battle for Dune, or C&C Red Alert seem ridiculously hard compared to more recent things like Dawn of War, C&C 3, or Warcraft III.

[twmac]

I know what you mean, even Ghouls n ghosts made sure you had infinite continues becuase the core gameplay was so hard that it didn't matter how many lives you had.

Dark Sector from the basis of punishment is quite good, the bits that are most likely to get you smashing a controller through sheer confusion always restart you right back at the beginning of the encounter (although sometimes just before an annoying cutscene).

My problem with it was the lack of logical feed back for when you were doing something right on some of the boss fights.

Rather than out and out frag fests of some of the other games in this genre, all the bosses were more like trial and error puzzles (the first big boss is invulnerable to fire, that is, until you do something else and although he doesn't appear to have changed he is now susceptible to it). The more I've played it the less I resent it as I've come to realise that is the way you play the game and I just have to put my Metroid/castlevania II hat on and look at the layout of a level and figure out what I've got and how best to use it.

I would say that this ethos is missing bar from a handful of games (Tombraider being one of them). Most developers would have given you some kind of in-game cutscene to point out the enemies weaknesses or made them larger and quite a bit brighter than they are in Dark Sector.

In fact, the encounters are less and less annoying becuase I'm not blaming the game but rather myself for not figuring it out. It is still going to piss most people off but then that is what Gamefaqs is for.