Gears of War was a great game. Diving from cover to cover, blasting at enemies wildly, ripping them to pieces with a chainsaw. It had everything you want from a third person shooter. So, it was only natural that everyone else would try and rip it off to sell their game. So say hello to the latest in a long line of Gears rip-offs; Dark Void.

I haven’t really followed Dark Void that much, but from what I gathered, it’s a shiny new game whose main hook is that you have a jetpack (say it with me now! Oooooo, jetpack.) Aside from that, all I’ve heard is that Capcom have lost confidence in the game, lowering sales expectations from around 1.2 million copies to six hundred thousand, which is never a good thing to do when the release of your game is imminent. But do they have reason to lose confidence? Well, yeah.

The first part of the demo shows off the shiny jetpack, which… isn’t all that exciting. You’ve played a flight game before, right? Like the Rebel Squadron series? Just imagine one of those types of games, and you’ve got the flying sections of Dark Void. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before. The enemies you get placed up against are these tiny flying disc things as well, and it’s really difficult to try and position yourself so that you can kill them. Or maybe I just suck at games.

The other side to the action is familiar territory, as the camera goes over your shoulder and you dive from cover to cover shooting aliens. At least it’s done well, and the controls are responsive enough to not make combat a chore. Still, we’ve done it all before, and there’s no interesting spin on it to make it more exciting, so there’s not much to say about it to make it sound exciting.

The graphics are okay, but really, in this day and age, okay just doesn’t quite cut the mustard. The characters are smooth, but there isn’t much detail to them, and the enemies are practically identical to the Geth from Mass Effect. The environments aren’t interesting at all, since you see the natural surroundings from high up in your jetpack, and on the ground you’re gonna be in an alien made structure. Not impressive at all.

The sound doesn’t make up for it much either. Guns are laser based, so make pathetic laser noises whenever they’re fired, and even flying around lacks much ambient sound that would actually make it more interesting. Still, the voice acting isn’t bad, since they’ve got the voice of Nathan Drake (ya know, Uncharted?) on board. Or Desmond Miles if you have no idea who that is (ya know, Assassins Creed?). The script isn’t great, but he has a lovely voice, so he can be forgiven. So again, nothing inspiring in the sounds department.

It’s a shame really, given that there’s a jetpack going on and everything, that Dark Void is just another lame Gears clone. If you’re looking for one of those, you might as well pick up Matt Hazzard dirt cheap. Sure, it’s a terrible game, but it’s more fun than Dark Void. Still, if you like flying around, go pick this up when it comes out on January 12th. Ooo, isn’t that when Army of Two comes out? Get that instead!

Really enjoy flying round like a loon? Never liked that voice actor? Tell us about it in the comments!–*