Dark Sector

The Short


Pros
- Fast paced, bloody third person shooting
- Glaive throwing is fun and violent
- Uses glaive with environmental elements for puzzles, attacks, etc.
- Melee and glaive-play is fun
- Graphics still look decent, if a bit dark
- A good way to relieve stress and kill time

Cons
- Repetitive
- Apes a bit much from Gears of War without doing much original
- Story is stuuuuupid
- Game can be really glitchy and have unfair deaths
- Final boss is a massive pain in the butt
- Level bosses are also pains

Gears of Sector

The Long

Dark Sector went through a lot of changes before becoming the game we have today. Announced waaaaay before Next-Gen consoles came out, it was originally slated as a sci-fi stealth game. But something happened between then and when Dark Sector came out, and that something was Gears of War. 

The game saw a radical shift in tone, style, and generally everything (though the "liquid metal" sci-fi look stayed the same) resulting in a game that is, well, Gears of War with a glaive. And while this isn't bad, it certainly is less unique among the billions of third-person shooters that popped up after Gears of War came out, while had it remained a stealthy space game (with a liquid metal glaive) it might have been a more memorable experience.

This game still looks pretty good now, four years later

The story for this game is rocking stupid. Hayden is a whiny emo-boy who somehow got put into the secret forces, and is sent on a stealth mission (which might have carried over from the original design) to mess up some terrorists with an eco-bomb or...something, I dunno. Anyway it infects him and turns his right arm into Liquid Terminator (essentially) and lets him spawn a big, nasty glaive that flies back towards him like a boomerang. Personally I think he got an awesome end of that deal, but Hayden just prefers to whine about everything.

So yeah, voice acting is awful, story is dumb, and is basically an excuse to "kill hella dudes," to quote Jeff from GiantBomb. Which I'm fine with; I started skipping the story segments near the end, so who knows: maybe there was some amazing plot twist in there that I skimmed over. But odds are not in Dark Sector's favor. 

Dismemberment is the order of the day

Since it's story is balls, Dark Sector has to rely completely on its gameplay, and it's actually...not awful. At it's core, this is Gears of War. You have the ability to slide into cover, vault over cover, blindfire, "roadie run," and perform melee finishers when close. Wait, that last one wasn't in Gears of War. That's fine; the finishers in Dark Sector are bloody, violent, and awesome. It's just too bad that (like any canned execution) there aren't more of them. 

The only real twist between this and Gears is that you have a GLAIVE, which the game actually uses pretty decently. You can just sort of "toss" it out there for a stun and minimum damage, you can chain it between people ala Zelda's boomerang, you can do a rad slow-mo camera view where you directly control it into a guy's arm/head/leg/whatever and show them what they get for trying to hide behind cover, or you can shoot it into a nearby flame/electricbox and add that element to its attack. The latter thing mentioned is also used for puzzles, such as charging the glaive to power doors, or put it in fire to burn enemies only weak to fire, etc. It can also pick up guns for you if I remember correctly (it's been a while since I played this game), but I only used guns like how I used them in The Darkness: if my magic demon powers (aka glaive) didn't reach them. 

Executions can be pretty grisly

That, in a nutshell, is Dark Sector. There are a few really great parts (slicing dudes up with the glaive, getting close executions, etc) but there are also some pretty awful parts. You fight some big beasties that are only weak to elements and are difficult to dodge. For some reason, stupid Hayden still moves like a tank (aka Gears) even though he's clearly slender and unarmored, which makes no freaking sense. The final boss is also obnoxious, and while the glaive is cool often it can bounced off stuff in weird ways or not do what you want it to, which is really annoying, especially considering I played through it on Hard and you die pretty quickly.

You also drive a vehicle because, you know, why not. 

Graphically, Dark Sector actually looks pretty decent. It has that whole "grainy brown and gray" that seems to permeate every single game to come out this generation (again, I think this is Gears of War's fault), and the enemies look a little plastic, but the character models and dismemberment/blood are quality, and since it runs on the Unreal Engine (like every freaking game this generation) it has texture bump-mapping and all that stuff that makes games look better. Again, for a four-year-old game, it is certainly not bad. They do love their motion blur, though.

Fire glaive will mess you up

As it stands, Dark Sector just sort of exists. It has a lot of neat ideas and moments, but it's wrapped in a shell that is just like every other game to come out around that era. It's glaive idea is a cool one, but it's restrained by the trappings of the cover based, third-person shooter genre, where if they'd just done their own thing it might have actually had an opportunity to grow into something really unique. Still, it's a pretty neat little game, and the fact it's $5 brand new at Gamestop (less used) makes it a complete steal at that price. It isn't going to blow you away or anything, but I enjoyed my time with it, and even writing this review has made me want to pick it back up again and do another round of glaive-induced dismemberment.

So as it stands, it would earn a three out of five. And at the price mentioned above, if you enjoy these kind of visceral, third-person cover-based shooters, you really should just pick it up.