Installation as a Way of Life

One of the joys of reviewing software is the requirement that we give the defendant a fair trial before hanging them. One of the first hurdles a new game must overcome is actually getting itself onto the PC.

Darklight Conflict does this very neatly under DOS, and the instructions are simple to follow. A little more automation might have been nice here but if you do what you're told in the correct order then all should be well. Sadly, the same cannot be said of the W95 installation. Darklight Conflict supports DirectX 3.0 and the PC CD reference card sets great store by this support. So, I set about a W95 install.

Oh, it installs smoothly enough all right. Trouble is that the instructions have you going back and forth between the W95 install routine and the DOS one. After you've deciphered this particular puzzle, then you set the sound card up. Still no problem.

Things start to go wrong when you actually run it. None of the intro ever makes it to the screen (of which more later) and the game launches straight into a demo. Well, the intro is no great loss in the grand scheme of things.

The next thing you notice is that the sound in the intro stays on for about three seconds and then there is nothing. Not a squeak. Silence. Even when you kick off a game, nada. Zip. Same thing using both an SB16 and an AWE32. Both cards are the real Creative boards and should be just about the most standard thing you can find. No joy.

Further trouble occurs in that the game invariably locks up after five minutes or so. I tried for hours to sort this with no effect. I even downloaded DirectX 5. No change. Electronic Arts' support people were "puzzled" and made all sorts of reassuring noises. Thanks guys. In the end, I went back to DOS and the whole of the rest of the review is of Darklight Conflict running under DOS. The W95 support seems to have been bolted on, badly, just before release to widen the market Electronic Arts could sell the game into. (Me, a cynic? I think so.)

DOS was a more reliable platform, but the game would still hang intermittently in spite of a slavish devotion to the rituals and mechanisms of building boot disks. Then again, I've played flakier games. Much flakier.

Cool Running

Once you get the game started, there are the obligatory "We Made This" and "We Market This" screens. Thankfully, they are brief as well as pretty.

The game then launches into a well-rendered demo. The scene is dawn on a US Navy carrier. You watch an F-14 take off and splash a few (presumably) Russian fighters. Cut to an alien who shoots the plane with a purple beam thingy and lifts the pilot out of it. I had to watch a couple of times to figure this out.

It all makes more sense if you read the pamphlet, er, manual, that is supplied. It appears that the Reptons are getting their asses kicked by the Ovons. Unable to train replacements quickly enough, they have taken to abducting ace pilots from other planets. These pilots are genetically modified and surgically implanted into Repton craft. They are then forced to fight for their new masters.

That's you, that is. Not one of the masters. Just what's left of a human fighter pilot. Welded into an alien ship. Forced to fight a foe you know nothing about and have never seen.

Sort of fails to light a fire in your belly, doesn't it?

Back to School

Once we have all overcome our motivational problems (minor matters such as "Why the hell should I care?") we are presented with a menu where we can choose a one player (campaign) game, multiplayer (slug-fest) game, configure controls/graphics or look at an Encyclopedia where we can browse through known ships and other space-borne objects.

Selecting One Player Game, you are presented with another menu from which you can pick Arcade, New Adventure, Continue Existing Campaign or Choose a Mission.

Arcade is just wave after wave of Bad-Men-In-Ships™. Shoot 'em all and then shoot some more. This kept me interested for nearly five minutes. Really. It's THAT exciting...

In the Choose a mission, you can replay only those missions you have completed thus far in your campaign.

So, the bit of the game that will keep us at it the longest is the campaign part. Selecting New Adventure starts you off on your campaign by sending you to a training base called Kampuss.

There are a couple of words of warning here:

1. You can only have one campaign at a time. DO NOT start another campaign as you will lose the one you have slaved over for hours and hours. Not that this has happened to me. Oh no. AAAAaaaarrrrgggghhhh!!!!
2. DO NOT RE-INSTALL THE GAME! If you do, it will overwrite your campaign and you will have to restart from scratch.

With the various problems with Windows 95 sound support, I had to install the game several times. I am sick to death of the obligatory training missions. There is no way to avoid doing them and they're thorough but uninteresting and repetitive. Well, fourth or fifth time round, anyway. Having struggled manfully on, you start the campaign proper, but before going into detail on that, let's discuss the front end.

In Trouble and Out of Control

The game screen itself is simple but rather cluttered. There is an oval viewing area through which you can see the world as it explodes messily for your entertainment. On the left hand side are three arrows. A green one points towards mission objectives, a yellow one towards enemies and purple one points at friends.

In the bottom left is the most useful of the instruments, a 3-D scanner display. For those who are ancient enough to remember Elite, it is lifted straight out of that game. You are at the centre of a 3-D grid and objects are seen as blobs on sticks. Once you are used to it, it is a very useful instrument that is quick to use and understand.

Top right is an Energy Bar which tracks how much of your (finite) supply of power you have used and a Stress Monitor which tells you when you're about to blow up. Occupying the left side is a speed indicator and the bottom left is occupied by Weapons information. The current target is surrounded by a cursor and will have a leading line. This is the point at which you fire to hit the craft if it doesn't change speed or course.

There are three methods for control: Keyboard-only, Joystick-and-Keyboard and Mouse-and-Keyboard.

Keyboard-only is not for the faint-hearted. This should only be attempted by concert pianists, and even then under close medical supervision. I found the game almost unplayable using the keyboard on its own.

Joystick-and-Keyboard was almost as bad. If you don't want to read on while I digress a little into the History of PC's, skip two paragraphs and pick up again with "Why, oh, why..."

Y'see, I have spent a long time playing this sort of game. Back at the dawn of time when PC's were a twinkle in Big Blue's R&D budget, all games that used joysticks had digital ones. Not like the modern digital ones. You were either going up or not going up, left or not left. Like in Space Invaders.

Then along came Progress and we got analogue joysticks. These let you go left slowly or quickly or very, very quickly. This was a Good Thing. Just right for flying and aircraft or, say, a spaceship. Recently, there is the new wave of digital sticks that are like the analogue ones only more responsive still.

Why, oh, why, with all the wonderful control technology available on the PC is the joystick interface for Darklight Conflict so appalling? It is just like the digital joysticks of old. It's so bad that I even e-mailed the developers. They said: It's just like that. No one else seems to find that it's a problem.

Mouse-and-Keyboard is definitely the best of a bad lot. Shame they couldn't have lifted this from Elite as well. It's more like the Doom-type mouse control. Not really ideal for space simulations, but adequate at a push.

Flash, Bang, Wallop.

The variety of weapons is good but a little confusing to say the least. Each weapon has its own characteristics. There are a good variety of weapons including the usual direct fire goodies such as laser and cannon mixed with a selection of missiles. There are some unusual weapons too, but I'll leave them for discovery by the intrepid players of the game.

The graphics and sounds are good but not exceptionally. The sound has good depth to it, but lacks flexibility and increases/decreases in huge steps as rather than smoothly as you move further from/closer to an event (e.g. explosion). The graphics are quite pretty but don't really seem to come up to the mark of the super-realistic real-time stuff we are increasingly seeing elsewhere. To be fair, this is a failing of many space sims (look at X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter) but there are those which with each release present a new target for others to aim at. Yes, I do mean Wing Commander.

The campaign itself has a large number of missions that vary little in style and execution. They consist of 4 basic types:

1. Shoot a few things
2. Shoot everything
3. Don't let a few things get shot
4. A combination of the above

The campaign is very linear and you just hack away at each mission until you finish it and then move on to the next one. Some of the missions are hard. Very hard. Almost too hard. This is most definitely a Good Thing. What the game lacks in motivation and plot, it can, and does, make up for in difficulty.

I haven't got too far through the campaign yet, but I will. I will.

Wot, no network?

I haven't said much about the network/internet multiplayer side of the game yet. And I'm not going to. There is a basic problem for me in reviewing this part of the game. Each player needs his or her own copy of the game. No amount of CD shuffling was going to get me away from that. Shame, really. I suspect that this would be an engaging if limited way to while away a few hours.

It would have been nice to see a system whereby there had to be a proportion of players with their own CD (maybe half?). The cost of setting up a four- or six- way shootout (yes, it support up to six players) is quite punitive.

Yes, but did you like it?

Well, on balance, this is a pretty average game. It has some good points and some very bad ones. Good DOS support, poor Windows 95 support. Good visuals, poor controls. Good missions, non-existent plot.

This game is as average as they come. What I hope is that Rage will be using this as a building block for a really competent game. Let's just hope that this one doesn't hold them back.

The Marauder for Game Over!