The following article is an abridged version taken from the latest issue of Edge. A more thorough report on the game can be found in issue 199, which is on sale now. Subscribe (America).


Dark Void
PC/PS3/XBox 360
Capcom
Airtight Studios
US Release: TBA
UK Release: TBA
Origin: US
Screenshot Gallery


With their dashing pilots, deep ravines and sinuous dogfights, the Crimson Skies games were no strangers to the occasional collision.

Airtight Studios, however, born from the ashes of FASA Interactive and home to the brains behind the memorable High Road To Revenge, is experiencing a new kind of clash with its latest epic, Dark Void.

An unlikely figure in Capcom’s ongoing romancing of western developers, its barnstorming fantasy has more to reconcile than alien invasions, Serbian physicists and 1940s derring-do.

But selling an American game to a Japanese publisher wasn’t, explains Capcom producer Morgan Gray, as hard as you might think.

“When those guys left Microsoft they were determined to make a game that focused a lot more on character,” he begins. “It was crucial to them. You think of Resident Evil and you’ve got Leon and Jill, think Street Fighter and you’ve got these 20-plus characters. So Capcom’s push was: ‘Yeah, let’s do it’.”

It’s funny that he should mention those two in particular, Resident Evil 5 and Street Fighter IV being games that have made Dark Void, the fruit of Airtight’s labours, a footnote on Capcom’s release schedule. Bionic Commando, the series reboot long underway at Swedish studio Grin, has even eclipsed it as the publisher’s great hope for western development.

Two things, though, set Dark Void apart. It’s a fresh IP for one, conceived entirely in the US and nurtured by Capcom’s head of R&D, Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune. Airtight’s pedigree, furthermore, suggests a studio well attuned to the bold, proudly referential house style that spawned Lost Planet, Dead Rising and Devil May Cry.

Enter Will, a cargo pilot who ditches his bird in the Bermuda Triangle and washes up in the Void, a parallel dimension ruled by an ancient alien race, The Watchers. A human resistance movement, The Survivors, welcomes him in classic hero fashion as a saviour from the heavens, which as luck would have it, he is.

Cut from the same cloth as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, he soon finds himself taking on the entire Watcher army, defying gravity and tyranny in equal measure.

“Gears Of War: love it,” Gray declares. “But it plods. It’s big guys fighting big things. We have this jetpack and our hero’s a little slimmer; so we want people to engage, hit the pack, leap over the enemy and shoot them in the back of the head. Even the big ones. We want motion.”