Dark Horizon Review

By Kelly Monfort | September 20, 2008

Have any of you ever heard of Freespace?  Freespace 2?  Freelancer?  Or even the Wing Commander series?  Well I know I’ve played all of the aforementioned games and enjoyed them all immensely.  Dark Horizon reminds me of all 4 mentioned above, except on a less grand scale.  Dark Horizon is a space flight fighter game based in our universe far into the future.  Let me tell you, it nails the story.

The opening cinematic for Dark Horizon reminds me of Homeworld.  Homeworld had this great black and white stylized way of projecting the story forward without have to rely on too much graphics.  Dark Horizon on the other hand uses the engine to make the cinematics.  The dialogue and voice overs are spot on, and don’t sound like your usual phoned in sound bytes.  The Cinematic explains the games purpose.  Mirk, a primordial existence that does NOT exist in ANY way shape or form has begun to infest the universe.  It has taken over and killed many sentient species and has taken over the Sol system, the original home of the Humans.

You start the game as a Guardian of the Third Degree.  Guardians are mirk infested men and women who can control the infestation, and use it to find and fight the Mirk in space.  In the game, before you go to the hangar you can read about your dreams.  This allows an in depth look into your chars. previous life.  They call this the Alphametrics log, and beside it they have the Brancing Signals log.  The Alphametrics details your dreams (which the Guardians keep for review) and the Brancing Signals is an explanation, of some sorts, of the dreams themselves.  The story of Dark Horizon is deep and a little confusing, if only because to understand the game you have to read a lot of stuff in the logs mentioned above.

When you get to the Hangar, a Bios, a sentient creature made by the Humans greets you and instantly begins to mock you.  This gives you a sense that your char. isn’t exactly all that great of a pilot, either that or the Bios is an arrogant fool. (either way he’s not nice.)   In the hangar you can modify your ship.  When I say modify, I don’t mean just to equip new weapons.  I mean you can literally MODIFY the thing.  You can change hulls, change armor, power cores, armor, shields, weapons, missiles and Modifiers.  You can do all of this from the Hangar meniu, where the Bios can deconstruct some older obsolete equipment and turn it into units you can use to create newer, better stuff.  You can customize weapon type, power, damage or cooling.  You can create modifiers(that are illegal) that will modify your stats, like armor, speed, cooling or shielding.  This part of the game is very indepth and game changing.  You can create a near invincible ship, thats slow and sluggish, or a fast, flitting fighter that’s not so tough.  Or you can go both ways, and create a balance ship that’s manuerverable and tough.

The gameplay in Dark Horizon is a throw back to Freelancer, with a little bit of Freespace gameplay mechanics thrown in.  You have NPC ships that you can order(to attack your target, attack your pursuer etc. etc.) or you can just fly it alone with your squadron.  The AI in the games not exactly bright, as there are two difficulty settings.  Easy and Normal.  Either one, the games pretty easy.  Most missions are your regular space fare, you go out, encounter the enemy and kill them.  However Dark Horizon mixes it up fairly well.  In some missions you have to escort freighters to rescue stranded comrades on a broken part of a super large space station, or escort mining ships to mine the path so to thwart oncoming enemy units.  In latter missions there are ship to ship engagements, which is pretty epic.  What’s so great about Dark Horizon isn’t just the gameplay though.  You have two choices on how to play the game.  They call it Corters.  There are two different kinds of Corters, Shadow Mode and Corter Mode.  Shadow Mode allows you to fly without being detected(unless there is a scanner unit around) and Corter allows you to fire faster and cause more damage at the cost of losing your shield power.  This mixes the gameplay up and allows the player control on how erratic and quick the game is, or slow and methodical.

Also you can change the view from third person to Cockpit, which is great because it gives better immersion into the game.  Immersion is key in a space game, as without it you cannot really get into the gameplay.  Story alone can’t do it, and Dark Horizon does both fairly well.  While in firefights, there’s background chatter that gives you a sense of true to life combat situations.  Some voices are frantic and morose, and others are hard and brave.  You can’t understand what they are saying, but the inflection in the static tells you exactly what’s going on; people are fighting and dying in the black Mirk infested void!

However with all of that said, the game is just a tad bit broken.  Enemy units can fly through the huge stations and other ships, but the player cannot.  This puts the player at a disadvantage.  Also sometimes the game won’t load the right savestate, and puts you into an earlier part of the game.  However the most annoying part is the random crashing during a heated firefight, when things are getting at their highest fun factor.  I can’t complain though, even with all of these problems I still played and finished the game.  It’s worth that much time.  I invested a whole weekend and a week day for this game, it’s just right for someone wanting to zip around and blow stuff up in space.  This is a buy when it arrives on the 23rd!

Dark Horizon published by Paradox Interactive

Developed by Akeela Studios and Quazar

Game available September 23rd through the Gamersgate dowload service.  www.gamersgate.com