29-04-2008
Hayden Tenno can't
give you a hand
As doing so may just cut it off
accidentally - literally. Sure, accidents happen A LOT
in DARKSECTOR, Digital Extremes' first current-gen title
for both PS3 and Xbox 360, and that's for the fun part,
such was the mindset of our London and Toronto-based
developers, who in the past made a name for themselves by
porting over a couple of PC games to consoles. Now they
finally got a chance to come up with something big,
something much more personal, well not that personal if
we choose to take some of the influences into account,
especialy gameplay-wise.
After being sent on a
mission that required you to dispose of an elemental
outlet for spreading a dangerous infection that plagues
Lasria you, an athletic-shaped and selfish special forces
agent known as Hayden Tenno, face greater adversity as
the source of the infection - two scoundrels
characterized by pretty much the same level of badassness
- assails you abruptly. One of them, uglier than the
other, is called Nemesis and has powers and she's wearing
what resembles a metal suit. As our main character
attempts to save his life she slices open his right
shoulder, meaning to kill him with the virus that is
rapidly spreading across his body but then he gets away
clean (well, sort of) with a self-made explosion. In the
meantime you're still infected, of course, and soon you
faint. Hayden then awakens and discovers his right hand
now controls a full-fledged retractile glaive ready to
chop off a bathful of pates, and more limbs you could
ever dream of. Now the cool thing about this newly
acquired weapon is that it comes with more special
abilities, for this infection is highly prone to
mutation, e.g. a bullet-proof shield or temporary
invisibility, but those upgrades only appear later on in
the game. The same evolutional feature, a very important
aspect in the game may I add, is also present in the
score music, and that Keith Power has grasped better than
anyone else. You may not have heard of that name before,
I too will not try to conceal the very proof of my
ignorance, not up until recently while playing through
the game that is, but a quick peek at IMDB tells us he's
been a busy little bee working as an assistant to Brian
Tyler, today's hottest Hollywood composer.
The ways of the glaive
are quick and ready for a greal deal of damage as you
shove the game disc in the tray, taking you to the main
menu. Beholding only thy glaive under rainy weather
conditions, your ears fill with subtle dark-mooded
music. Desperation is at your door steps, and it's using
an effective amount of ambient synths and slow strings to
come in. A male choir then comes into gradual focus, its
growing sound snaps at you, and just when you think it's
going to get bigger it vanishes without a trace, the
empty space now being taken up by a fully developed
theme. Memorize this fine piece of work as well as you
can, for you will not hear its more defined forms until
the infection no longer has you but the other way around
and, when that happens, I guess you are about ready to
put on your new suit
Okay, I didn't mean to
scare away the theme-freak in you by saying that from now
on it all goes ambient with long stretches of silence, by
no means, as various sorts of percussion instruments and
weird noises to help in building up the subplot play an
import role among other things, but somehow you'll have
to earn that. The most memorable musical cues, for
instance, happen when you take on bosses (mostly robots
and one big ogre-looking monster in some kind of church)
and as you fight them gigantic bastards sometimes one
popular theme will surface yet again, you know which one,
and at that point it turns out the main menu theme is in
fact shaping up to become Hayden's theme with an even
darker undertone, the kind that would make you resort to
another wave of cold-blooded dismemberments, when you
thought, maybe, this was a theme of themes. And it's
something I'm really content about for this is one cool
sounding piece of music and I took undeniable pleasure in
hearing its multiple variations, to the extent of
disregarding some of the major faults I encountered (huge
framerate-related issues particularly during the last
battle, story-bound conundra plus a large number of dark
halls that all look like one another) while pretending to
be Hayden. Nothing is flawless anyhow but this is just
begging for a sequel with more Power(s).
--grammata
Christine |
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