Space combat simulations have been one of the few genres which really haven't seen many advances in the last few years in terms of gameplay. While graphic cards and other hardware can help provide a better experience, the genre has fallen into a rather limited style of gameplay. While Dark Horizon, a new space combat sim from Paradox Interactive, attempts to bring some new features and a rather deep story to the genre, it fails to be more than just an average space shooter, though still enjoyable to play.
Dark Horizon places you as a Guardian of the Third Order, one of those that has been affected by the Murk but is able to control it to use in combat. With your wingmen, you're tasked on a series of missions to aid in discovering anything useful to use against the Murk, and defending the stragglers of the universe from the forces the Murk sends against it. The bulk of the story, in terms of both the universe and your character's background, is given through written logs that you can read through between missions, which, while allows for much more expansion of the backstory without tying you up from gameplay, can also be easily skipped if you're just interested in playing the game. The few pre-mission cutscenes and radio communications between your fellow pilots, used to help fill in the key details, leave a lot of questions that really could have used a few more key cutscenes; for example, I felt absolutely no connection to my character or his co-pilots, and thus made it difficult to really get into the story of the game, making all that wonderful text that supports it feel like a waste of time.
Prior to a set of missions, you're given the opportunity to customize your ship to a high degree; you can set your hull, engine, and shield components that fix the mass (and therefore the speed) of the ship, while your weapons, missiles, and other components can only be set to keep under the amount of energy your ship can generate. As you complete missions, there are a lot more components that become available, and without an easy of way of trying them out besides taking them out on a mission, it may become a bit daunting. Fortunately, the game allows you to auto-configure your ship based on one of three archetypes depending on your play style. However, once you've tried a few of these, you'll likely go back and make a few adjustments to make sure you're satisfied with them. There's even an option later in the game to create your own weapons by combining existing ones to make your own customized effects.
The game is pretty much a typical space combat simulation, giving you full control of your ship in three dimensions. Once out in space, you'll be notified of your mission through radio chatter between your wingmen and command, and targets are marked on your HUD with a few ways of cycling between them. The HUD provides both an indicator for missile locks, as well as a leading reticule that shows where you should be firing your guns to have them land hits. Each ship will have an amount of base resilience, armor, and shields, and in order to take down any ship, you need to take out their shields and armor first, with the option of selecting weapons that target these specifically or that spread the damage around evenly. Your own ships have the same situation, and once you see your core resilience depleting, you know it's time to hide until your shields come back.
To that end, the game provides a unique feature of allowing you to alter the temperature your ship is running at. Cooling the ship allows you to enter a silent-running "Shadow Mode" which makes you mostly invisible to enemy ships, but also lowers your maximum speed and rate of fire. This is a good mode to avoid some of the more difficult firefights as well as simply to recover from battle damage. Opposite to that is the ability to heat up the ship and slip into "Corter Mode". This increases the power to your weapons when you need more offense, but at the same time draining your shields, so it's a mode that should only be used tactfully. Unfortunately, you can also unwittingly slip into this mode if you fire your weapons without pause and don't allow them to cool down. In the middle of a heavy firefight, you may find that you need to start cooling your ship at the same time as maneuvering and firing on your enemies while ordering your squadron around. It can be very daunting and really needs to have tight controls for this to work.
Unfortunately, this is not really the case. The controls for mouse, at least, are reasonably good and can be customized as needed, but the default settings for the mouse, placing direction, weapons, and speed control, felt right. However, with the cooling and heating options, as well as the weapon/missile cycling and radio commands, I feel that anyone attempting this game with a joystick, no matter how many extra buttons on it, will feel overwhelmed. Even in the default keyboard case, some of the keys are located to the left side of the keyboard, particularly for the cool/heat functions, and this can make it awkward to try to play through a straight firefight using tactics and trying to control your ship's temperature at the same time. The keyboard layout is still going to be tight even if you customize it heavily; there's just like 3 or 4 extra keys that fit outside the usual WASD to make them comfortable to use.
Combat can be rather difficult in the game. The AI for both your wingmen and the opponents is not very strong, but the computer is going to beat you by simply being more maneuverable and outnumbering you. Even when you ask your wingmen to help out, you're better off handling it yourself with the lack of speed and urgency they seem to perform their task. There is a difficult learning curve here, learning how to use the Shadow and Corter mode effectively along with using the right weapons at the right time; one absolutely critical piece of advice is to conserve the missiles, since these are going to do a lot more for you than your actual guns at times. Fortunately, the game has provided three difficulty levels to pick from when playing; I found Normal to be a rather good challenge, while Easy was much less hectic but certainly no cakewalk.
Unfortunately, the overall game is nothing really new once you've outfitted your ship and mastered Shadow and Corter modes. The space combat is pretty straight-forward with no real surprises. Missions are generally divided into a series of separate dogfights, thus requiring you to simply concentrate on clearing out one set of enemies and then moving onto the next. While your wingmen are chattering towards the story, these missions are rather generic, "Go here, fight baddies, then go there, and fight some more." There is the factor that while you can gear up to prepare for certain types of firefights when you're customizing your ship based on the mission profile, you may encounter situations that fall well outside it. For example, you may make your ship light and maneuverable to take out the smaller probes the Murk sends at you, but then encounter an enemy ship that takes a lot more firepower before it will go down; your weak ship may eventually be able to do so, but that's simply a lot of prolonged time to do so. I don't have problems with throwing surprises at the player like that, but as customization can drastically change how a ship performs, it would have been nice to have a bit more warning that a vastly different situation may be out there waiting for you, letting you opt for a middle-of-the-road craft. Since you only return to the hangar after a number of missions, picking the wrong type of craft means restarting that series of mission if you find you're having trouble.
The game itself looks fine; the graphics are well done, and do a good job with bright and vivid space backdrops and the various explosions from destroyed ships. The little popup window renderings of your wingmen and other people you talk to is more a throwaway, and really doesn't add much. Sound is more a problem; the background music is rather generic, and the voice actors feel as if they are reading their lines. I would have also liked to have a bit more sound effects tied to the HUD as to alert me to situation changes.
Dark Horizon is, overall, not a bad game, but it is run-of-the-mill. The new features that it offers –- ship customization and the Shadow/Corter mode -– may be new to space combat sims, but really are just extensions of common gameplay themes from other genres, and while they're implemented without any significant problems here, they also don't help to buoy the rest of the game from mediocrity. Surprisingly, this game screams for multiplayer but lacks any, as such; it would have been great fun to pit your own decked-out ship against friends, or even to have them along for a co-op mode. The game, overall, is not very deep, and while you'll likely spend a bit north of ten hours working through the game, there's really that much to return to to enjoy it. Dark Horizon is a good, polished effort, but really could have used a bit more oomph to make it a more entertaining title.
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