Dark Sector: Now With Less Sci-Fi, More Grit
Over the shoulder shooters are the future, man
by John Davison, 05/10/2006
Cast your mind back a year or so, to when Digital Extremes got us all giddy with the briefest of glimpses of it's first PS3 game, Dark Sector. At the time it was packed with form-fitting body armor and lots of blue, glowing lights, all dished up in a fairly conventional third-person action thing. At >E3 this year, they're showing it again behind closed doors, and things have defintely changed. The cybernetic futurisms have gone, and in their place we now have what the team is describing as a "twenty days in the future" vibe in which you play an FBI agent sent to a small Russian city to investigate what is ambiguously described as "a threat." Upon arrival you're attacked by a brain-drilling monster, which implants a parasite in your head, and then kills you.
In the finest of gritty sci-fi traditions you later wake up to find that your right arm has been replaced by a metal monstrocity, and the parasite within has given you regenerative abilities and super powers. Then things start to get interesting. As you stumble back out into the Russian landscape, you see that a war has broken out between "infected" locals, and an unknown miltary force which is attempting to wipe out the threat before it spreads further.Your eventual goal isn't clear, and although the guys at D3 Publishing are keen to show the way the action unfolds, they're evasive as to the ultimate point of the game.
As seems to be the latest fashion at E3 this year, the game has evolved into an over the shoulder action title (think Resident Evil 5, or Gears of War) that has you experimenting with a variety of weapons, as well as the slowly developing weirdness associated with your new metal appendage. A Krull-like projectile weapon referred to as the "mag disc" by the Digital Extremes guys is the first thing you discover, and from what we saw during our brief demo this translates into "fun with physics." Throw your metal boomerang at enemies to dismember them, break stuff in the environment, or even attach explosives to it, or throw it at items and use it to grab things from a distance. It's the all-purpose super-weapon of choice, and when used in combination with more traditional weaponry has some interesting potential.
No release information has been set yet, nor is D3 ready to share screens or video, but we'll hopefully be bringing you some more details in the next couple of months.
