Dark Void

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Rise Up

"Dark Void's only new idea was the ability to seamlessly switch at any time between old-fashioned, ploddy tortoise cover-based shooting on the ground and rocket pack whoosh crikey fun. And you know what? That could be enough." —Yahtzee's review

A 2010 game, developed by Airtight Games, and published by Capcom.

The game begins in 1938, with ex-military pilot William Augustus Grey (voiced by Nolan North who seems to play all the male video game protagonists these days) and his former lover Ava making a cargo run from America to Europe, when their plane loses power and crashes over the Bermuda Triangle. They awaken in a bizarre alternate dimension, known as "The Void." They soon meet up with The Survivors, a human resistance movement that is fighting the attacks of a strange reptilian race known as "The Watchers" and their robotic army.

Apparently, the Watchers fashion themselves as gods, ruling over the less advanced humans after they destroyed their own home planet,before primitive man eventually rose against them and banished them to the Void. Soon, Will and Ava meet up with Nikola Tesla, who has also found himself trapped in the Void. He equips them with hoverpacks, and Will eventually gets a true Jet Pack. He takes to the skies, to stop the Watchers before they return to Earth, taking advantage of the coming conflict. There's something else going on, and Ava knows more than she's telling...

The game is notable for seamlessly integrating third-person over-the-shoulder cover-based gunplay with jetpack dogfights, and has the unique feature of 'vertical cover'. It's also one of Yahtzee's "Branston Pickles" - flawed, but unique and entertaining despite those flaws. So try it anyway.

Not related to Darkrai's signature move.

Tropes used in Dark Void include:

• Action Commands: In order to hijack an enemy 'hubcap', you have to do one of these. However, you use the control stick to dodge its turret fire, your melee button to damage a panel, and the control stick to struggle with the pilot once he pops up to knock you off. This makes it a rare example of an Action Command that makes sense, and therefore doesn't annoy the player or break immersion. Also, you destroy fifty-foot monsters by scrambling over them prying at weak points.
• Action Girl: Ava.
• Badass: William Gray.
• Bald Black Leader Guy: Atem. Will ribs him about the whole "humble guide" image he puts on.
• Bermuda Triangle: It's apparently a gate to an alternate dimension (the Void), but it's not the only such gate.
• Cartwright Curse: Will and Ava. This troper knew she was doomed the moment she started talking about them sitting together, watching the sunset, on her favorite bench in London, as soon as both of them escaped the Void.
• Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: Apparently the Watchers replaced the Prime Minister of France with one of their own, which would explain why Germany was able to conquer France so quickly.
• The Chessmaster: The Watchers are manipulating the powers of Earth into World War II. Will is the Spanner in the Works that mucks all their plans up, though.
• The Key: Will. Not that it's that big of a surprise.
• Color Coded for Your Convenience: The different Watcher soldiers come in different colors to distinguish their specialty and behavior.
• Cool Airship / Cool Starship: The Ark, and the captured Watcher transports less so.
• Cosmic Deadline: Worse than Fahrenheit (2005 video game), in case you never though that possible. The first third of the game preps you on cover-based shooting and eases you into the eccentricities - hovering, vertical cover, etc... before giving you the promised Jet Pack. The second third is your cannonball playground, though it feels sparse at times, as if there's story you're missing - The Ark was obviously supposed to be the Hub Level, but you just move from there to the next stage via Time Skips. The final third has two awesome stages - one where you blow the s#!+ out of a monster the size of Manhattan while inside its stomach, and the final boss battle is an Old School Dogfight against a freaking three-headed dragon. Except... there's no buildup!. Your Mad Scientist friend is killed without fanfare, an Oracular Urchin throws a prophecy at you, and your character gains undefined Magic and Powers solely to fight the final boss. The thread that proves it? The first "episode" had six levels. The other two have four.

Yahtzee: The developers planned out a HUGE EPIC GAME, the various components of their studio started working on all the little bits of the HUGE EPIC GAME, and then they ran out of laundry powder or whatever it was and had to string together all the little unfinished bits into something vaguely sellable. They wrote a script for Lord of the Rings and ended up having to perform it with finger puppets.

• Derelict Graveyard: The Void has a bunch of these.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The Final Boss is only several dozen times the size of Will. However, he has Magic and Powers for some reason, so it's all good.
• Dying Declaration of Love: Will's last words to Ava, before she dies closing the gateway between the Void and our world: "I love you!"
• Édouard Daladier was an Alien spy: It doesn't get any more literal than this one, folks...
• Episode Zero: The Beginning
• Flying Saucer: The main vehicle of the Watchers. The Resistance guys call them "hubcaps".
• Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: A textbook case of Tropes Are Not Bad. You're playing along, wondering if they're ever going to vary up the enemies a little—holy crap it's King Ghidorah!
• Heroic Sacrifice: Ava. Only one of them was ever going to end up going back home right from the beginning. And it wasn't her.
• Humans Are Special: The Adepts.
• Jet Pack: The game's main selling point. It is awesome. In case you ever forget that You Want A Jetpack, this game will remind you exactly WHY.
  • It's also in Dark Void Zero, and is very awesome there, too. It's got infinite usage, and a free-hover mode.
• Kill'Em All: By the end of the game, every major character except Will and Atem have been killed by the Watchers (Tavi's fate isn't explicitly shown, but given that he was replaced by a Watcher shapeshifter it's a pretty good bet he was killed in captivity).
• La Résistance
• Nikola Tesla: He invented the Jet Pack and some of the weapons you use in the game. He is killed by a shapeshifter about 3/4 of the way through the story.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: The game was completely overshadowed by Dark Void Zero, which was only supposed to be promoting Dark Void. Probably because Zero used old-school ideas that just plain work, instead of trying to mash together two ideas that don't work. The same exact thing also happened to the new Bionic Commando and its promo game, Bionic Commando Rearmed. Guess which one now has a sequel.
• Powered Armor: The enemies in the game seem like humanoid robots, but are actually robotic suits worn by the Watchers for combat, as most of them are really rat-sized slugs (although they eventually grown into the Elders, who are human-sized shapeshifters.)
• Retraux: An 8-bit version of the main theme plays during the end credits.
  • There's even an 8-bit game called "Dark Void Zero" that was released for download on the D Si, treated as some old game found in the Capcom vaults. It started as a joke based off the 8-bit song, then grew into a Metroidvania game.
• Sequel Hook: In the ending, Will is in London, 3 months after the final battle. Atem appears, telling him there is work to be done.
• Shout-Out: The achievement for flying between the legs of an Archon is "Forgot my Towcable." (Keep in mind, flying between an Archon's legs will probably also get you killed, if not by the turrets, then by running into the ground or hitting the Archon's tail.)
  • "She handles like a dream!"
  • "Stay on target..."
  • Let's not forget what the power output of Tesla's Hypercoil weapon is... you guessed it: 1.21 Gigawatts
  • The Resistance fightercraft bear a strong resemblance to a certain Incom-produced snubfighter.
• Tagline: Rise Up
• Toasted Buns: One of the loading screen tips mentions to keep your limbs clear of the exhaust. The graphics clearly do not obey this instruction, but Will is unharmed by pack.
• Two-Fisted Tales: You play as Ace Pilot William Augustus Grey, Trapped in Another World enslaved by Ancient Astronauts. It's Up to You to Save Both Worlds. Nikola Tesla is here too - and the first thing he gives you is an awesome Jet Pack! Squee!
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Will and Ava give no discernible reaction to the fact that they meet NIKOLA. FREAKING. TESLA.

Ava: Long way from Colorado Springs...

• Unwinnable: Thanks to some very serious glitches, at least two levels in the game can be rendered Unwinnable, and due to the game's extremely irritating autosave/checkpoint system, you can't load an earlier save; the only fix is to restart the entire level.