A mechanical door opens, you leave the pod only to find yourself completely lost. With no clear path to follow you randomly start walking around, your boots slamming against the hard metal floor, your only guide is an A.I. voice that tells you that you're the first one alive. Is this true, can you trust it? Right now you have no other choice!
Dark Matter describes itself as a platformer with no jumping puzzles, a survival horror without the horrible controls, a game where exploration and adventure take center stage. It also claims to have a unique light/darkness system that influences the combat heavily, making it more tactical than most shooters.
Thankfully this description is pretty accurate, the developers certainly knew what they were doing.
I'm guessing the good folks at InterWave Studios established certain goals for their game and what they wanted to make of it and so far, at least from what I have played, they seemed to have accomplished most of their objectives.
"Dark Matter’s intense storyline set in a sci-fi/horror/adventure world set on the deep space exploration vessel, the Endeavor. One year into its mission, the Endeavor sent a static filled communication about strange lights and angels and then was never heard from again. You play as Ensign, a female crew member who emerges from cryosleep almost 70 years after the final transmission. The crew has vanished and the Endeavor now drifts in space dying and infested with unknown, deadly parasites. You must survive long enough to get the ship running before it dies, find out what happened to the crew and the mission and make it safely home."
This is the plot of the game, while in this preview build I only got a glimpse of the story, mostly through our A.I. companion or some text logs left on the ground, it still was very interesting and mysterious, mainly because it was presented in short bursts and never broke the player's immersion with too much exposure at the same time.
Visually Dark Matter is very competent, the 2.5D graphics are very detailed, maybe a bit repetitive, but since we are inside a spaceship it is something justified. The enemies on the other hand are very different from one another, not only visually but tactically as well, each enemy type makes the player think and act differently, it can get pretty intense when you find different enemies all bunched up in a corner.
While moving through the Endeavor you can clearly see that Aliens was the biggest artistic inspiration for Dark Matter, the way the guns look and feel really give the sensation of being inside the flick directed by Ridley Scott.
The combat requires "the type of twitch aim and quick reflexes that first-person shooter fans enjoy", using light only when needed is essential as most enemies start "nerd-raging" if a light is pointed at them, this means that fighting in the dark might be the best option most of the time. The concept of choosing between being able to see your enemies or being able to kill them is not new (Doom 3), what is new is the fact that light actually makes your enemies stronger, it really is something the player has to think about and decide in each encounter.
InterWave Studios also decided to include an interesting crafting system, you can create your own bullets, weapon mods and health-kits by using 3 different materials, fullerene, amber and dimedron. You can also trade the scrap that you pick up around the Endeavor for fullerene, the trick being that the more scrap you have the more it is worth, creating a nice system that gives the player a reward for waiting on cashing in those materials.
Dark Matter is certainly a promising game, you can see that InterWave Studios has some really talented people working on this title, I wish them the best of luck for the future.
The game will be available for PC, MAC and Linux at launch which is always good news.
The game will be available for PC, MAC and Linux at launch which is always good news.
Greenlight Page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=103509725
NRLB would like to thank InterWave Studios for giving us the opportunity to fully experience the preview build of Dark Matter.
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