Dark Angel Review

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            Dark Angel

Review by Skinny Minnie and TogerJanuary 2003

Minnie’s Xbox Skinny

I get my kicks playing games, so when a certain Xbox review copy hit my desk, I took a shot in the dark. I went where angels fear to tread. I played Dark Angel.

Supposedly based upon the now-defunct TV show and featuring the voiceovers of its stars Jessica Alba and Michael Weatherly, Dark Angel features Max, a genetically altered, futuristic AWOL soldier and her underground, cyberjournalist buddy Logan Cale.  Playable character Max pummels her way through over twenty levels trying to bring down every member of the inexplicably evil military entity called I-Corp, with Logan interrupting every ten minutes to transmit annoying, wearisome, useless information to her. The setting is postapocalyptic Seattle, and I-Corp is supposedly a new branch of Manticore, the military group that created Max and other soldiers like her.

I never watched the show, and the game doesn’t explain how Max escaped her military service or why every living, breathing being within a thousand miles of her instantly recognizes her and wants her dead, period. After a beautiful but uninformative opening cutscene, you take control of Max in the third person, and by her third step on the postapocalyptic pavement, she is being punched, kicked, dragged and thrown by droves of enemy clones.

Max does begin with a lot of cool moves, and you will unlock more of them as the game progresses. Her moves are very smooth for a 3D, third-person gaming protagonist. If you’re the type who flips over hand-to-hand combat and fancy physical maneuvers (with little else going on), Dark Angel may be for you.  Personally, the last game I played with punching and kicking in it was Omikron in 1999, and I’m still within backward shouting distance of the “where the hell did the vertical plane go?” stage of console gaming, so maybe it’s just me. Nevertheless, cool though Max’s karate kicks may be, they wore thinner than a chopstick after about five missions.

Conversations are limited to Logan’s incessant, “Security is heavy in this sector; be careful, Max” and Max’s sarcastic, end-of-fight-scene comments to dead baddies like, “You’re done already? I was just getting started!” or “You’ve really gotta get to the gym more often.” The voiceovers themselves aren’t bad, but there’s no story here and no interaction with baddies whatsoever aside from kicking, smacking, or hurling them around ’til they’re dead (unless they do the same to Max first).  There is precious little interaction with the environment, either.  Outside of a cool high jump to about four total second-story ladders during the whole game, Max is unable even to perch upon a knee-high box for a breather.

Adventure elements are limited to picking up purple, glowing objects like health packs, tonfas and door pass cards that merely lead to the next fight scene, which only appear after the last baddie in an area is felled. I once found a radio instead, and while fiddling with it in inventory to see if I could fake a call to I-Corp’s home office for a pizza, Max put it down on the ground where it immediately melded with a wall it was leaning up against.  Unable to pick it up again, I moved on, and it seemed to have no effect on the game’s outcome.

The dreary, repetitive scenes themselves are decently rendered if slummy and militant looking. Graffiti mars the punky alleyways and streets, while darkened halls, buildings, bridges and ships harbor similar crates, oil barrels and police cars.

Colors are drab and areas so similar that you might lose your way if not for Dark Angel’s extremely scripted and linear nature. You’re forced down very narrow paths, often with little choice as to how you can successfully complete an area’s objective.  Throwing switches to deactivate surveillance cameras or computers is about as interesting as those objectives get, too, and they’re sandwiched between droves of enemies that tend to attack relentlessly with the same limited moves (except for a few bosses, who themselves are quite similar). Logan suggests stealth in various areas, and Max does have a cool, Splinter Cell-esque sneak-up-behind-an-enemy-and-snap-his-neck move, but oftentimes the camera angles are so bad (especially near walls or in narrow confines) that you can’t see other baddies until they have spotted Max and set off alarms. Once the alarms are wailing, a timer immediately counts down the limited seconds until reinforcements arrive, at which point it is game over. The camera also has the annoying habit of giving a tilted, overhead view that only makes matters worse and lessens visibility even more. You can only save at certain checkpoints, which often are too sparsely placed to avoid major backtracking. I ultimately still had two minor boss fights and four major boss fights to go when I started scouring the web for cheat codes, just to get this repetitive slog of a game over with. I came up dry, and were it not for a teenaged console junkie’s volunteering to switch off failed levels with me, I probably never would have seen the uninspiring ending scenes.

The music is good and sound effects are limited but okay. However, not much could rescue the overall redundancy of the action and the high frustration level (due to poor camera angles and having to constantly repeat levels due to timeouts) of Dark Angel.  The only thing saving this game from cornpoop is Max’s smooth moves, and this game is a rotten egg even at that.

Toger’s PS2 Play-by-Play

I have a confession to make. I didn’t finish the game I’m about to review. Shocking, isn’t it? Read on, dear reader, and know my pain.

Ten years after terrorists have unleashed the Pulse—an electromagnetic shockwave—the US has become a Third World nation. Martial law is the standard of the day and armed soldiers patrol the streets to keep order.

Max is one of several genetically enhanced humans created and trained by the Manticore Corporation to be the perfect soldier.  After witnessing one of her siblings killed, she and several others escape from Manticore; each going their own separate ways to avoid capture.

While operating as a cat burglar, she meets Logan Cale, an underground cyberjournalist and hacker. Together, they bring about the destruction of Manticore.

The game’s events take place after the downfall of Manticore.  The I Corporation, another company researching and developing genetically engineered soldiers, has identified Max as a viable genetic sample and has made her capture its number-one priority.

Let’s talk about the voice work, shall we? Did the actors pull an all-nighter before recording their voices for this game? Perhaps they hadn’t had their morning caffeine injection yet. Whatever the reason, the voice work for Dark Angel was horrible.  Dialogue delivered by the “stars” was so emotionless as to be sleep-inducing. The voiceovers for the various and sundry enemies had more emotion than these two. And while I’m at it, let me mention the lame one-liners that Max delivers just before taking on a new set of enemies … On second thought, forget I mentioned it.

Dark Angel is played in the third person, with the camera located just behind Max’s shoulder. Well, most of the time that’s the view. Other times, I’m not quite sure what the view is supposed to be, as the camera appeared to have been attached to the bottom of the Goodyear blimp as it soared high over Yankee Stadium. During what I call “balloon on a string” view, it was impossible to see if any soldiers were lurking around corners or hidden in the alleys created by all the crates littering the landscape.  (Why exactly are all those crates and boxes lying about?  Are the longshoremen and truckers on strike?)

For the most part DA is hand-to-hand combat with the occasional opportunity to pick off the patrols with a stealth/stun gun. (I have to say when using the stealth gun it was very entertaining to see these guys dance in a web of blue light.) Max is able to achieve an astonishing array of moves by pounding the heck out of the square, X, triangle and circle buttons. Included among her repertoire: head kicks, back flips, aerial side rolls, jabs, spin kicks and the ever-popular “ball breaker” (yep, that’s what it’s called and that’s what it does). My favorite move was sneaking up behind someone and using a chokehold to quietly take out the I-Corp minion. What I couldn’t understand was why Max couldn’t climb over the hundreds of crates and boxes just sitting around. Curiously enough, even though she can make a four-foot or higher jump to grab the end of a ladder, she can’t jump higher than the curb anywhere else.

Once you’ve played about five missions, and I’m being generous here, you’ve pretty much seen the entire game—sneak, kick/punch/choke some soldiers, pick up a keycard, open the gate. Rinse and repeat.  On occasion, you’ll need to blow open a locked door with the conveniently dropped packet of C4 explosive. In this game, you’ll never be at a loss of what to do or where to go as the developers lead you by the nose … er, hand throughout the entire game, even going so far as to flash a picture of what you’ll need when you get there.

During some combat sequences, the game will highlight some of Max’s moves by showing them in slow motion a la Max Payne or The Matrix. I’ll admit it was cool to watch, at first, but quickly got annoying later as it interrupted the flow of the combat.

Speaking of annoying, let’s talk about the “help” that Logan gives during the missions. At the beginning of each mission, you’ll receive a transmission from Logan providing back-story for the mission. During missions, he can and will contact Max with information that he feels she needs—like telling her she’s halfway there. I cannot begin to tell you how irritating it was to be in the heat of combat and have to stop to receive a worthless transmission from Logan! On the upside, if you ignore the transmission icon long enough, it will go away.

Dark Angel also incorporates some stealth elements. I say some, ’cause just between you and me the stealth elements didn’t always work. Maybe it’s just me, but how can you sneak off the top of a train, being patrolled by moving light sensors, when the only move open to you from the top of the train is a double somersault in the tuck position (naturally). And you can’t peer over the side of the train to check the position of the roving lights? Where’s the stealth in that? Getting off that train is simply a matter of I-hope-the-light-isn’t-aimed-at-the-bottom-of-the-ladder-when-I-do-my-dismount.  (Do I score a 10 for that dismount?)

There’s a stealth meter incorporated in the game to give you an indication of how close you are to being seen—it ranges from blue, meaning all clear, to red, which is just before they cart you off in cuffs. The stealth aspect is, at best, iffy. You never really know if an enemy will truly see you, and when it does the meter progresses to red so quickly you have no chance of saving yourself.

The AI for Dark Angel is … interesting, to say the least.  For instance, I discovered if I stood in a doorway—just enough to trigger the door to open but not step across the threshold—I could target and take out a bad guy with the stealth gun. (And I mean stand in the doorway, not just peeking around the corner.) His companions might notice him doing the electric slide and come to investigate. Then again, they might not. You really never know unless you play the level over and over and over again. As is invariably necessary.

Visually, the game was decent, although the character sets for the bad guys were so limited I was beginning to think they were all clones. I especially liked the shadows cast when Max, or anyone else for that matter, stood within view of a light source. The shadow would darken or fade based on the distance of the light.

Dark Angel’s music was suitably rocking and not at all intrusive. To tell the truth, I didn’t notice it for the most part.

Now you understand why I didn’t finish the game. I probably got very close to the end, but I just couldn’t endure it any longer.  The wretched camera angles, the lackluster level design and the repetitious gameplay were more than I could take for a full 25 missions. If it weren’t for the music, halfway decent graphics and Max’s cool moves, this game would have garnered the FFC pile o’ cornpoop. As it is, it’s nothing more than the rotten egg.

If you’re a fan of the Dark Angel TV series, maybe you should just wait and buy the first season DVD set. However, if you’re a bona-fide, die-hard fan and must have all things Dark Angel, at least wait until the game hits the bargain bins; which should be in about 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Fox Interactive Publisher: Sierra Release Date: December 2002

Available for: Xbox PlayStation 2

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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