The Mirk & Hangar
In Dark Horizon, players take the role of a Guardian of the Third Degree, one of a special kind of person who has been infected with The Mirk but is able to control it to fight back against it. The Mirk is a massive, mysterious entity that has no form and constantly flows across the galaxy, destroying everything in its path. Creatures from within The Mirk known as Spawns, protect and further The Mirk’s efforts of further destruction and domination. As a Guardian, it’s your duty to help protect your outpost and keep The Mirk at bay, and hopefully one day find a way to get rid of it.
Something you’ll notice very soon in playing Dark Horizon is that it establishes quite a deep universe for players to get into. It’s primarily text based, in the form of reading your character’s dreams and their interpretations, as well as a large databank of information, but the developers really put in a lot of time and thought to come up with such a large universe complete with multiple races, quadrants, ships, technologies, etc., and a good story to go with it. At first, all of this information can be a little overwhelming, but if you keep in mind you don’t have to read or understand it all from the get go, you’ll be just fine.
The campaign spans twenty-two missions that range from simple engage and destroy missions to other missions that require you to escort, protect, rescue, and all things in between. The missions are also multi-faceted in that you will often do a combination of these types of objectives throughout one mission.
Before heading out into space to take on the forces of The Mirk, you’ll want to plan out your ship’s design. This, like the backdrop to the story, is a deep and well thought out aspect of the game that requires your attention. In between each mission, you have the option to change your ship in nearly every way by altering things such as the hull, weapon load out, heating and cooling system, power cores, armor type, and shield type. The trick is to find the best equipped ship for the mission. You can easily construct a behemoth ship that is nearly impervious to enemy fire but moves very slowly. Alternatively you can construct a very nimble craft that still carries a respectable amount of firepower, but that cannot sustain great amounts of damage. Obviously, you’ll usually want something in between, and the game does actually include an Auto Configure option if you don’t want to spend too much time with this feature. In my experience, it was always best to focus on a ship that has a lot of armor and less speed, but personal choice, skill level, and mission requirements will vary your decisions.
One thing about the ship customization feature that can be a pitfall, and was for me on just a handful of occasions, was when I built a ship for a mission that I thought was going to be suitable or great, and then as the mission went on and objectives kept getting added, I realized I was out classed, i.e. I had taken the wrong ship. You will also want to be particular frugal with your missiles, whether you’re carrying sixty weak ones or twenty of the stronger variety (or any of the others), because in nearly every mission I’ve ran out of supply and was forced to use my lasers and teammates to finish the job.
Never Fly Alone In Space
Your teammates are fellow Guardians and are actually quite self reliant and it’s a great idea to use them quickly and often. You can issue five orders to them when in battle including ‘Attack My Target,’ ‘Attack the Pursuer,’ ‘Missile Volley,’ ‘Cover Me,’ and ‘Spread Out.’ Because most times your allies are off screen, you won’t get to see their immediate reaction to your commands, but they do actually work rather well. If you’re having trouble finishing off a particular target or are engaging a particular strong target, having your squad help you out works, although you might have to issue the command more than once. Likewise, if you’re trying to focus on a ship’s generator or other static element, and don’t want to be bugged by the enemy ships flying about, telling them to cover you often works great. Another good thing about your allies is that they don’t seem to die; I haven’t yet completed the game, but thus far, they haven’t even come close to dying, but since we’re so outnumbered, but better trained anyway, it still seems reasonable and fair.
I, on the other hand died quite often during the first two to three hours of playing Dark Horizon. There is a learning curve to it, be warned, but I imagine if you’ve played space combat games before, things should come pretty easy. There are a lot of elements to Dark Horizon’s gameplay that are positive, but take a little getting used to.
To begin with, the controls are more in depth than your average game. You need to get comfortable with controlling the throttle, weapons, ship maneuvers, squad commands, and temperature controls. Before elaborating anymore, let me discuss another key element to Dark Horizon, the temperature mechanic.
Corter And Shadow
Your ship’s temperature is a vital part of the gameplay. When your ships temperature gets very warm, either from you laying on high speeds or the after burner, or by just using a particular weapon, like an enhanced laser, that adds a percentage of heat to your ship, you enter what’s called Corter Mode. You can also enter Corter Mode by pressing the raise temperature button. In this mode, your shields steadily deplete but your rate of fire increases. It’s a fairly dangerous mode to be in, because low shields means your armor is much more vulnerable to a hit. When your shields and armor expire, you’ll begin to take damage to your actual ship, and it won’t last long without protection, even though shields do regenerate slowly when not taking damage, it’s usually not fast enough without several hundred points of armor standing by.
You can get out of Corter mode and let your ship begin to automatically recharge its shields by using the cool temperature button. By holding down this button for a few seconds, you can cool the temperature of your ship so much that it goes into a Shadow Mode, whereby your ship is invisible unless the enemy are using scanners. Otherwise, in this mode, you can ease on by enemy forces, great for slipping through a heavy blockade for example. You can still fire when in this mode, but at a much slower rate.
One, I guess, interesting, application of this that I discovered is that you can get yourself into Corter Mode, continue firing at that especially fast rate, and hold down the cool temperature button and you’ll get into Shadow Mode. Once there, your rate of fire slows, but until then, you can keep firing in Corter Mode and work your temperatures down. Intuitively, I would have thought you would have had to slow down or stop shooting altogether, but it seems like the cool temperature button trumps your firing systems.
Anyway, getting used to controls allows a little time, which is understandable. Once you’re comfortable, it’s fun to constantly be making adjustments on the fly, doing things like taking yourself in and out of first person mode (much easier to aim this way), changing your temperatures, and switching between the various targets around you.
Sights And Sounds
Dark Horizon is a nice looking space combat game. I liked the various colors of the stars and planets you see while flying around in game. The variety of ships is neat too; some are massive, others are small, the load outs and hulls make them look different, too. I also like the cutscenes and the menu, they’re crisp and efficient.
In terms of audio, Dark Horizon does a pretty good job here, too. The voice overs sound sincere and are of high quality. A variety of voices including those of your fellow Guardians, the verbally abusive robot in the hangar, and others sound unique and good.
The sound effects felt a little held back, however. Explosions seemed contained and I didn’t get the expected audio kick from my ship’s after burners or from its weaponry when fired. I wonder though, if the soundtrack to the game, which is a good set of instrumental, somewhat intense, fast paced music, overshadowed the effects too much. When in combat, which is the majority of the time, the soundtrack comes through load and clear, but the other sounds seemed largely drowned out.
Other Notables
Dark Horizon was not without a few bugs. The worst bug I encountered seemed to be with video trouble. The problem happened most consistently when going from combat to an in game cutscene, or right before a new mission’s cutscene. When it crashed, it did so rather ungracefully and I would get dumped out the the desktop with about eight errors waiting for me to click ‘Ok’ on. Part of me wants to say it has to do with the codecs used in the video, but in the case of the in game cutscenes, those video are in game and so I wouldn’t expect them to be compressed into a video file. However, I noticed that in my System Tray after the crash an icon from the K-Lite Codec Pack was up, but that could have been there during one of the full motion, or non-in game cutscenes.
Another issue I had that could somehow be my system, although I’m not sure how, is when one day I had quit the game, and came back about an hour later to resume it. It looked like things were loading up fine as it got through the logos of all of the brands involved, but then nothing came on screen after that; this would have been right when the opening cutscene was to play. After a system reboot, all was well again.
These two types of problems were really all I experienced. The former issue definitely made me wish there was a quick save feature; the game saves for you at certain junctures in the mission and in between missions, but at no other time can you save.
In a nutshell, Dark Horizon is a deep and fun space combat game with a good dose of RPG that will easily appeal to fans of space and flight combat.