Dark Sector



Dark Sector is a third person action game developed by Digital Extremes.

You play Hayden Tenno, an operative for an unnamed American intelligence agency. He is sent to the fictional Soviet nation of Lasria to gather information on a mysterious epidemic. Of course Hayden has a Dark and Troubled Past, and is angsting about his current assignment, afraid of being infected or reliving his past misdeeds. Obviously, The Virus is on hand to give him superpowers (as viruses that infect the protagonist are prone to doing).

False pathos aside, Dark Sector is actually a decent game. While it doesn't do anything perfectly it does do everything quite well. Gameplay revolves around Hayden using normal weapons and his infected powers to confront enemies: other infected and the Lasrian army trying to contain the infection. Hayden's most important (and gameplay impressive) power is the use of the Glaive, a sort of three pronged ninja star he can use to do pretty much anything Xena can do with her Chakram, and it's awesome. Gameplay also includes taking over Lasrian military hardware and turning it against them and some minor physical puzzles that can be solved using Hayden's powers. All in all an enjoyable if somewhat light and linear action game.

This game provides examples of:

 * AKA 47: An odd example; almost all the weapons are modelled after one weapon but named after a different but similar weapon. So Hayden's Heckler & Koch Mark 23 is called the "Tekna 9mm" after the Russian SR-1 Vektor pistol, the "Vekesk Micro" is a Klin PP-9 named after the SR-3 Veresk submachine gun, the Hammer 1895 is a Webley Mark IV named after the Nagant Model 1895, and so on. The only exceptions are the AK and RPG-7.
 * Awesome but Impractical: The Trooper Gun. Also the magnum and sniper rifle; they both draw from an absolutely tiny pool of rare ammo.
 * Awesome Yet Practical: The Glaive, pretty much all of Hayden's infected powers. The glaive is a double action (decapitating, dismembering) oversized frisbee that can pretty much do anything you want it to do. The other infected powers include turning invisible to one-hit-kill enemies from behind, and redirecting bullets fired at you back at your enemies. Guns are pretty much just gravy compared to the Glaive.
 * BFG: The space-suited Lasrian Elites use the "Elite Trooper Gun," a massive multi-shot rocket launcher with an underslung pneumatic gatling gun. In game terms, this works out as "RPG-7 with shorter reloads and one of those godawfully inaccurate mounted guns stuck underneath."
 * ...thus neatly removing the weaknesses of both the RPG (no backup weapon to deal with trash) and the mounted machinegun (piss-poor accuracy matters a lot less when you can just move the gun up close and personal).
 * Big Bad: Really hard to decide if it's Mezner or the AD.
 * Boring but Practical: The Vekesk Micro is about the best all-around gun in the game, using plentiful ammo with a huge stock and doing respectable damage.
 * Boss in Mooks Clothing: Lasrian Elite Troopers are Giant Mook enemies inside bulletproof Powered Armor spacesuits, equipped with a combination minigun and rocket launcher. There are about 5 of them throughout the entire game.
 * Cutscene Power to The Max: Hayden's C4. The block he throws in Viktor's lap is enough to destroy a sprawling complex that takes up most of an island (you're supposed to place more, but the game forgets to give you any reason to actually do so). The block you later find during actual gameplay barely destroys a single door.
 * Cursed With Awesome: Subverted, Hayden finally realizes his infectd powers (like being able to deflect bullets) are not a curse.
 * Deliberately Monochrome: The first level is pretty much in black and white. It's not really all that clear why.
 * Disability Superpower: While you'd only know from reading the previews since it isn't mentioned in game, Hayden has a condition called congenital analgesia; this results in insensitivity or indifference to pain, and is how he survives infection with The Virus. He's a fairly unrealistic depiction of a sufferer, given he hasn't managed to hideously damage himself accidentally during childhood.
 * And the fact that he visibly shows signs of experiencing pain at multiple points during the game.
 * The Dragon:
 * Eldritch Abomination: Technocyte organisms get larger and Stronger With Age, and it's heavily implied that after a few centuries they become outright huge Eldritch Abominations. Mezner's plan is apparently to send out a signal that will go across the globe and wake these guys up from their ancient slumber deep beneath the ocean depths.
 * Enemy Civil War: Hayden is targeted by other infected and the Lasrian army, both of whom work for Mezner. But they don't like each other. In fact they are just as likely to kill each other as they are to try and kill Hayden.
 * Feel No Pain: Pretty much why Hayden takes the infection lightly compared to everyone else.
 * Follow the Leader: Dark Sector apparently had a MGS-style "press against wall" cover system until the developers played Gears of War, realised the button-to-take-cover system was far better, and used that instead.
 * Dead Space was rather obviously based on Dark Sector's early trailers. Both Dead Space and Dark Sector use a blue indicator on the player character's back; for Isaac, it's health, for Hayden, it's his shield's power meter.
 * Both Dead Space and Dark Sector crib heavily from Resident Evil 4. The aiming style mixed with the occasional need to mash buttons to get clingy enemies off of you are quite similar. The Lasrian guy in the sewers you meet to upgrade your weaponry oddly sticks out like a sore thumb until you realize he's a knockoff of Resident Evil's merchant. Hayden even holds his pistol in the same fashion as Leon does, until he gets infected.
 * Gas Mask Mooks: All of the Lasrian soldiers wear gas masks, save the ones who wear space suits.
 * Godzilla Threshold: Perhaps the only thing more horrifying than what the Lasrian military does in response to the infection is the strong possibility that it is actually JUSTIFIED considering the danger of said infection.
 * Guns Do Not Work That Way: Hayden's "Tekna 9mm" and "Tekna Burst" have "Cal .45 Auto" stamped on the slide.
 * "Ok, how about the C4?" "For Yargo, I'll give the Semtex..." Erm...Semtex is not C4, guy.
 * The Heros Journey: Referenced directly and played straight.
 * Hey Its That Voice: Lex Luthor as Hayden, Murdock (or Barclay) as Mezner and The AD, Jurgen Prochnow using the "foreign actor" rule to play Yargo, Blue the Blue as the shopkeeper, and Nolan North is in there somewhere. Nadia is a muppet.
 * Hyperspace Arsenal: Averted, you can see exactly what weapons Hayden is carrying, aside from grenades. Additionally, you can carry at maximum three guns, and you have to drop the third to switch back to any of the other two.
 * Impossibly Cool Weapon
 * Interface Screw: Enferon turns the screen various vile colours. Also, while smoke from the Jackal is supposed to show you when it's damaged, the Jackal always gives off a ton of smoke, even at 100% health.
 * Kryptonite Factor: Enferon, a chemical which is only a minor irritant to humans but will kill infected Technocyte creatures quite quickly. You can find weapon add-ons to lace your own bullets with Enferon, which nearly doubles the power of your bullets and poisons infected enemies.
 * Mega Manning: Many of Hayden's powers wind up being similar to the Nemesis that infected him, but there's a few times where he copies the abilities of another enemy he's defeated, most specifically the giant Stalker that turns invisible.
 * Melee a Trois: You have the player vs the Infected vs the Lasrian Military.
 * Mirror Boss: Your final fight against The Dragon. By this time, Hayden's infected powers have fully developed and he is now a match for it; he's even got a cool piece of techno-organic armor just like the Nemesis. It also shows off that it's capable of doing a few things you thought you had exclusivity on, such as throwing its blade and imbuing it with lightning.
 * No Name Given: He's called "The AD" so you can distinguish him from Adam.
 * No Ontological Inertia: Rather inconsistent. Bodies of soldiers persist, and certain types of infected enemies will remain, but others melt away into nothing.
 * Noodle Incident: Large chunks of the backstory are treated this way. It's mentioned the infection got out and was contained in the past, but no details are given. Hayden went psycho and killed a bunch of people in a previous mission, but no details are given. Nadia and Hayden have history, but no details are given.
 * Obvious Beta: The rather broken plot is the key, but there's also some weird graphical glitches; sometimes metallic surfaces (including Hayden's arm) will have only their normal map applied but not their texture, and enemies occasionally glide along the ground instead of walking (it's actually rather disturbing). Also, the game frequently crashes during the cutscene after defeating the Stalker.
 * Our Zombies Are Different: Whilst the older technocyte infected tend to be superhuman type things, superpowered animals or Eldritch Abominations the basic infected enemies are essentially metal skinned zombies, complete with zombie gait, moaning and the occasional scene of them seemingly eating corpses.
 * Plot Hole: The developers came clean about the game's plot; apparently, as they were editing the game down, the only people they had to run the plot past were already familiar with it, so the huge omissions (what Hayden's "condition" is, his history with Nadia, Nadia and Viktor being related, etc) were never picked up on.
 * Precision Guided Boomerang: Literally guided.
 * Puzzle Boss: All of the bosses have elements of this, but the Nemesis is the most obvious one, as it cannot be harmed by normal weapons and has to be killed through a very specific set of actions.
 * Revolvers Are Just Better: The revolver is by far the most powerful pistol in the game. This appears to be because it loads and fires sniper rifle rounds.
 * Samus Is a Girl: It turns out that Mezner's Guyver looking The Dragon is  inside a Technocyte suit.
 * Shout Out: The Glaive is named after the similar-looking weapon from the movie Krull.
 * Spider Tank: Lasria's Jackal tanks are more "dog tank," but they still have legs.
 * Tactical Suicide Boss: The Nemesis. He starts the battle with a shield that can block absolutely everything you can bring to bear. The only way to break his shield is with an electrically-charged Glaive, but there's no exposed wiring in the room. Cue the Nemesis charging up his blade with electricity, only to have you dodge his throw and use his blade to charge yours.
 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill: In a cutscene Hayden shoots Viktor Sudek in the head. He then dumps a C4 demolition charge in his lap.
 * Universal Ammunition: Ammo is by weapon class, with very little regard for chambering. Most ridiculously, the Webley revolver shares ammunition with the SOCOM 16 sniper rifle.
 * Unusable Enemy Equipment: To begin with, Hayden can pick up any enemy weapons he likes; however, once infected the sensors on the weapons destroy them after a brief period if he uses them. This doesn't really explain why he can't take ammo from them, though.
 * If you watch the blinking of the sensor, most of them are very close to the weapon's magazine.
 * Weak Turret Gun: The massive DshK / NSV hybrid mounted guns are practically useless, firing patterns so ridiculously wide that it's hard to hit an enemy a couple of hundred yards away.
 * What Could Have Been: Initially announced in 2000 as a Unreal Tournament Spiritual Successor. Then in 2004 it morphed into into a sci-fi stealth-oriented third person shooter set in outer space, and then again in 2006 into what we have today.
 * In addition, the 2004 version would had involved a transforming suit.
 * What Happened to The Mouse: You know that guy Viktor Sudek that you dropped the demolition charge in the lap of? He's Nadia's father. The script totally forgets to make anything out of this or even mention it.
 * Xanatos Gambit: