Dark Sector (PS3)
Creating a signature weapon for your third-person shooter is a good way to stand out, and to Dark Sector’s credit, the one thing I knew about it prior to playing was that you utilized a triple-bladed weapon that wasn’t found in your usual line up of video game firearms. How much you emphasize this weapon though is another question entirely, and Dark Sector’s devotion to this Glaive ends up overly centralizing the experience even when it tries to concoct more potential uses for it.
Set in the fictional country of Lasria, Dark Sector begins with United States agent Hayden Tenno aiming to suppress the Technocyte Virus before it can spread outside the rather dreary country it emerged in only for him to get infected with it instead. While it transforms many people into almost mindless zombies and monsters, Hayden is one of the lucky ones who instead gains incredible powers from it, oddly enough one of them being to manifest the Glaive he’ll need to use for most of his work to quash the virus as the enemy weapons are designed to reject him. From there you’ll mostly explore the grey and brown cities, cemeteries, and sewers of Lasria to stop the madman Mezner who wants to spread the virus across the world, the story check-ins not really doing much to make Hayden more of a character and his supporting cast feel more important as pieces of the narrative rather than true people. The plot does not even take the time to explore seemingly important elements like whatever relationship Hayden has with a woman named Nadia despite their familiarity with each other trying to be a source of drama.
The action is thus tasked with keeping the player’s attention, and while the opening section is a fairly standard third-person cover shooter, once you get the Glaive things begin to change. The Glaive is thrown like a boomerang towards foes, needing time to travel and taking two hits to kill most standard soldiers unless you charge it where it can do so in one. The Glaive is meant to be your primary killing tool, the player allowed to wield a pistol alongside it but it’s not the toughest weapon to have as a back up. This does mean in a firefight though you’ll be hurling your Glaive, waiting for it to return, throwing it again, and gradually picking off enemies in a rather slow process complicated by the fact this game is a cover shooter and sometimes targets will hunker behind a barricade or crate so your Glaive hits nothing. The Glaive throw also has a bit of an unclear effective range so sometimes it can seem like it would reach a foe only to create a disorienting visual effect where it decides to turn around. Over time it does gain more abilities, some like being able to guide it through the air used more for hitting switches while others like picking up fire or electricity from the environment turning it into a more deadly tool, although at the same time lighting foes on fire doesn’t seem too devastating half of the time. A bit of a better addition to your unique abilities comes from the energy shield that reflect bullets and invisibility that can let you get in close to pull off a finisher, although finisher range feels a little finicky and the stuns that can make foes normally susceptible to them also have odd timing and distance issues.
Having things like the shield and invisibility does lead to a proper expansion in your base capabilities and starts to make you think about new opportunities during a firefight, but they are added rather late and most of your earlier ability acquisitions are minor boosts to your Glaive despite it not being the most satisfying weapon to wield. It is still mostly effective and the pistol’s presence allows you to get yourself out of jams caused by your Glaive’s slowness and committal nature, but when the enemy forces are low in number there is still some enjoyment to be had in slicing up your foes even if the skirmish feels rather toothless. Dark Sector is surprisingly forgiving in how damage is handled too, Hayden able to recover rather swiftly from injury so long as you can avoid taking more hits for a bit. This allows the player to stomach the moments the Glaive puts them in jeopardy, but it also is a bit of a band-aid for the fact the game’s cover system is rather imprecise. You are given a dodge roll to help you navigate battles better and get to cover, but the button it uses also is the one you use to hunker behind cover and Hayden isn’t always smart about how he does so. Sometimes he’ll stand with his back to an object he should be crouching behind, and cover seems to mostly be there to hide and heal rather than serve as a safe point to poke out from to use your weapons based on how weak the shooting from cover controls are.
There are other guns in Dark Sector, but after you get infected you learn quite quickly the flaw found in many of them. Any automatic or shotgun you grab from the remains of your enemies will start beeping, the weapons becoming unusable after a few seconds as a preventative measure Mezner’s forces added to their guns to prevent them from being pilfered by the infected. Unfortunately this means these guns end up unusable in many cases, firefights often at a good range so unless you want to run in and grab the effective assault rifles you’ll risk your safety to do so. The time allotted for their use often means you’ll be lucky to get in a quick spray before their usefulness is up and even fights with multiple waves will often stagger enemy arrivals just enough that picking up a gun might not avail you much before it burns out. This is where the centralization on the Glaive becomes a bit obnoxious, it not the best fit for every fight and slow to use to boot, but the game does at least recognize a desire for better weaponry will emerge and so a black market allows you spend money you find laying around areas to buy and upgrade new guns you can carry without concerns about the burn out. Better one-handed guns will give your Glaive a decent companion, but you can also carry one stronger weapon like a shotgun or assault rifle, the player even able to add a few upgrades to them to personalize their effectiveness some. Ammo is still kept somewhat restricted so you can’t swap to a full firearm focus, but getting a good reliable back-up does allow you to break out of the Glaive focus when it feels right.
Dark Sector has a few boss battles and none of them are particularly good. Part of this is because many of the boss monsters don’t show any sign of wear and it can be hard to tell if a weapon type is even doing true damage to them, especially with how long some fights are even when you are making progress. Fighting a hulking brute in the church for example drags on without really getting any more difficult, the player easily able to move around without concern for their safety and left hoping they’re doing damage since there isn’t much feedback to indicate if your weapons are doing their work. The game tries to whip out a few different segments to break up the action some, letting you pilot a mech eventually that feels a little basic in terms of what it can do in a game where firefights already struggle with variety and proper pressure.
Even the multiplayer ends up impacted by the Glaive’s hard push for relevance, the two modes on offer focusing on players playing as an infected character. In Infected mode only one character is infected and they use their Glaive and special abilities to fight a team of players as normal soldiers while Epidemic mode has two teams each with their own infected player backed up by soldiers where the goal is to take out the other team’s infected character. These can be played with bots but they are remarkably mindless, as in the soldiers will come to a stop to fire their guns, stand together in an easy to kill bunch, and feel more like cannon fodder than true contributors to the action. At least against other humans the infected powers feel appropriately limited, the Glaive not giving you a massive edge but things like the shield and invisibility still making the premise of a single powerful player against many weaker ones somewhat balanced.
THE VERDICT: Dark Sector leans hard into emphasizing the Glaive but its actual benefits to the third person shooting on offer don’t outweigh the sacrifices. Fights are slowed down by the time it needs to fly, its added abilities take a while before they truly change how you can approach a firefight, and the decision to not let you dabble in decent alternatives to it for a while makes the action start to drag. The Glaive does have its moments thanks to its strength and visual touches, but by forcing you to focus on it so much, Dark Sector lessens your enthusiasm for it.
And so, I give Dark Sector for PlayStation 3…
A BAD rating. The Glaive would be a great weapon if it wasn’t pushed so hard as your primary tool, its design not a perfect fit for going up against men with guns but you’ll often be leaning on it and a singular pistol to hold your own in battle after battle that could have been passed by more quickly if you could more capably scavenge the guns and turn them back on the enemy. Reasonable ammo restrictions would have accomplished the same feat of giving you reason to whip out your bladed weapon from time to time, perhaps the dropped enemy guns even being more about one use rather than limited time use if the game wanted to stick with something to nudge you towards more frequent Glaive usage, but instead it feels like the weapon is a shackle that demands you to keep battles slow and steady as you throw it, wait, throw it again, and then move onto the next of many gunmen in the area. This also leads to that issue with boss battles where it’s already hard to tell if you’re making a mark on them and the Glaive’s speed makes you even more concerned for how long the fight will take, some even having an instant kill move that would lead to a full fight restart. When you do get the chance to buy yourself a proper back-up weapon Dark Sector at least gives you the decent consideration of whether you want to use it or your Glaive depending on the demands of a situation, but with a sloppily told story that is conceptually simple as your only major motivator beyond the feel of the action, Dark Sector still feels like it never completely gets into a groove that earns your attention.
Dark Sector’s single-player could have been more exciting if the Glaive, invisibility, and the shield were all part of this entertaining alternative to normal fire, a useful alternate style of play to whip out when the situation demands or when you have brief ammo droughts. Rather than making it a captivating tool to pull out when appropriate though, Dark Sector demands you use the Glaive so much you grow sick of it and desire some standard video game weaponry simply because it will do the more basic jobs efficiently. There are still some problems like boss design and a plot that manages to be confusing despite its simplicity, but the same commitment to a distinct signature weapon that makes Dark Sector stand out also drags it down below its third-person shooter contemporaries.