Dark Sector is an action game with a gimmick, but it’s one pretty cool gimmick. The game is set in the near future at a time when a mysterious plague is mutating people into monsters. You play as a special operative named Hayden who’s sent to an Eastern European/Russian city to perform a variety of missions that involve rescuing scientists and assassinating would-be dictators on the rise. In the course of your work you become infected yourself and the infection takes hold in your right arm. Rather than weakening you, this particular infection makes you more powerful by giving the power to summon and use a powerful glaive weapon. While the story never quite lives up to the promise of the first few chapters it doesn’t really matter that much as the glaive is one cool little toy.

As you make your way through the game you’ll face a large number of foes both human and monstrous. The game does a good job of throwing these enemies at you in what amounts to series of set battles, in between which you’ll face some puzzles to be solved and some minor skirmishes. It’s a pacing that works really well, giving you a chance to catch your breath before moving into the next big battle. There’s also a good variety in those battles, so you’re not fighting the same fight over and over again. In the game’s first hour you’ll face assaults by large numbers of troops, a duel with a hulking monstrosity, and a battle in a dark underground chamber with a horde of zombies. The battles are fast-paced and the enemy AI is challenging, leaving you with sweaty palms and an elevated heart rate before it’s all over.

It would be tough for you to face one such onslaught after another if you didn’t have a powerful ace up your sleeve in the form of your glaive. It works like a deadly bladed boomerang – you fling it at a foe and if your aim is on target it will slice through him both coming and going. The game has a pretty gruesome location-based damage model in place, so if you aim low you can cut off an enemy’s leg at the knee or aim higher to lop his head off. Once you gain some skill with it you can ricochet it off of objects to hit enemies behind cover or to hit multiple enemies on its way back to your hand. As you make your way through the game you’ll gain new abilities for your glaive turning it into an even more powerful weapon. After-touch is a particularly useful ability, effectively giving you control of the glaive in flight, When you engage the after-touch the camera will even follow the glaive in flight, making it easier to direct it to where you want to go in flight. The glaive is also a versatile tool – you can use it to break locks, hit out of reach switches, grab weapons, and more.

There is a downside to the game in that it is very linear and sometimes it’s not always clear as to what you need to do to move on to the next area. On more than one occasion I found myself running around an area that had long since been cleared of enemies trying to figure out where I needed to go next and what I needed to do to get there. Overall, though, the game was a fun experience, do in large part to the unique and enjoyable glaive mechanic.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 86%. There may have not been a lot of hype surrounding the release of Dark Sector, but it’s definitely worth a look.