With great gameplay and challenging difficulty, Dark Void Zero is a short, but enjoyable experience.
Paying homage to the old school gamers, the first thing you see on the screen is a NES cart. Why? Obviously, being a NES game, you can't boot it properly until you blow the cartridge. After the little nostalgic moment of blowing into the mic to make the game work, you get to the title screen, which is pretty simple. You can check the high scores (just offline high scores, which is a letdown for a game like this that only people who have wi-fi internet would be able to get), continue from where you stopped or restart the game.
There are three difficulties, being Hard the difficulty from the original game. I highly recommend that you start on Easy, because this is one tough game.
The gameplay is a simple but quite effective formula. If you've played Bionic Commando (also from CAPCOM) on the NES, you'll feel at home. The main objective is to collect card keys in order to open doors that lead to new areas on the level, until you collect a golden card key, meet Nikola Tesla at a specific location and fight the boss. On the way, you'll have to solve simple puzzles and blow up enemies with a plethora of weapons and power-ups you find scattered through the levels . You can also collect floating orange balls to increase your score. Collecting the 100 balls from the level earn you an extra life. And to give you even more things to do on the same level, there are 5 things you must collect/destroy to complete the secondary objective.
What differs this game from Bionic Commando is also the greatest feature: a rocket pack. With it, you can fly and hover around the stage in whatever direction you feel like, making the game more vertical oriented than horizontal oriented.
There is a story, but it's nothing great and, like most NES games, it's just an excuse for you to jump into the action and attempt to reach the high score.
On the technical part, Dark Void Zero keeps his old-school roots, featuring typical 8-bit music and graphics. The surprising part about the graphics is that even though it's obviously 8-bit, it doesn't look old. In fact, the opposite happens: the supposedly dated visuals actually look fresh and new. The same cannot be said about the sound. the repetition of the same catchy tune with the same blips and blops from the guns might become an annoyance with time.
Sadly, the game is ridiculously short. The three levels in the game can be beaten in about two hours, on the easiest difficulty; The difference between difficulties is only how many bullets the enemies need to take before they die; and for a downloadable game where the main objective is getting the highest score possible, no online leaderboards is an offense.
Despite the length issues, Dark Void Zero is a great game, and for a price as small as 500 points, there's no reason to ignore it. Though not as fun as competing with others, you can always play it over and over to try to reach a new high score.
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Graphics: 9/10
Sound: 6/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Fun: 9/10
Replay: 5/10
Final Score: 8.5/10