Darklight Conflict

After Banging On The Door of what looks like a deserted building in the heart of the Liverpool docklands for a good 20 minutes, and then trying (in vain) to hoist myself up via the bars on the windows to at least see if I was at the right address (half empty pots of paint and a jamboree of junk that resembled Chris's desk here at Zone was a pretty good indication that I was), I was about ready to grab my bag and start the long journey home. Luckily, a friendly Scouser stuck his head around the corner and beckoned me to follow him.

"Sorry about the bars and the window, like," he said. "We don't like to advertise the fact we've got thousands of pounds' worth of hardware inside. And this is the back entrance - why didn't you come around the front?"

I looked sheepishly at the pavement as he led me through the fenced-off car park and into the Rage offices before introducing himself as John, Product Manager for Darklight Conflict, and shoving a hot cup of coffee into my hand. Jesus! It was at this point that I realised that it was bloody freezing outside - it was a sunny day back in London when I left.

Before I had time to burn my tongue on my life-restoring beverage, and my hands had a chance to feel like they were actually attached to the rest of my body, I was plonked down in a comfy chair and given the low-down on Dark-light Conflict by the programming team.

The game is set in the future (1999 to be exact) and the US Navy are busy fighting drug barons off the coast of Mexico. As luck would have it (or, perhaps, wouldn't), two alien races, namely the Reptons and the Ovons, have decided to interfere in the proceedings. The player, being an absolute whiz at aerial combat and an allround 'ace' type bloke, has been recruited by the seemingly friendly Reptons (anyone remember that bbc micro game Repton by the fight the Ovons (who have teamed up with the drug barons) on Earth behalf. Suffice to say, without giving too much away here, Darklight Conflict is a space combat game featuring a rather juicy plot that follows the player's struggle against the evil Ovons.

Another space shoot 'em up?

Well, er... yes, and no. You see, you do have to shoot at an awful lot of Ovons (and Reptons later on, for that matter) to proceed through the game, but Darklight also contains asteroid fields to navigate and mine, which brings a resource management feature (which is admittedly on the basic side) as well as a strong strategic element into the proceedings. In other words, you'll need more than an itchy trigger finger to get through the game.

As I spout off about the merits of X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Descent and Inferno, I'm presented with some early, albeit mightily impressive code. "We've looked at all those games," chips in programmer Colin, "and we've tried to include all the best elements but make it look a lot better. As well as concentrating on gameplay we've tried to make the visuals a lot more detailed and concentrate on producing some impressive real-time visuals."

A quick glimpse at what's on the screen is enough to confirm that they've achieved at least half of what they've set out to do. Colin explains how: "Unlike other games that try and cram as many texture-maps onto the screen as possible, we've gone down the opposite road and used some pretty complex geometry and light-sourcing to give the objects a realistic look. Basically, our engine allows us to construct objects made up of thousands of polygons and use effects such as lens flare and specular deflection to give the impression of a much more detailed player environment. At the same time we want DarkJight to be as accessible as, say, TIE Fighter or X-Wing in that the player doesn't have to wade through a wedgy manual beforehand. We want them to be able to get into the action with the minimum of fuss."

Before I can ask what 'specular deflection' is, John continues... "The engine you're seeing here is essentially a re-written version of the one used in Pyrotechnica. We realised that we had a very powerful tool on our hands, and that the player would probably appreciate :he result. With Darklight we wanted the player to see all the real-time lighting effects and feel the motion effect."

"Too right," adds Colin. "Our engine was so realistic it made people want to spew and we wanted to build on that ievel of realism."

Here any self-respecting games journo enquires what the expected frame rate will be. Not being one to go against the flow, this question leapt from my lips.

"On a P75 with 8mb of ram we're talking around 15 to 24 fps," confirms Colin. "We haven't started to optimise the code yet; we're still at a very early stage and all the de-bugging stuff is in there slowing things down, but we're confident that it'll hit around 20 fps on an entry-level Pentium running Windows 95 in hires. Don't forget that some of our models, such as the mother-ships, are made up of over 5,000 polygons, so what you're seeing is very detailed in terms of what you've seen before in other games of this type. Rest assured you won't experience too much slow down - we've found ways of keeping it smooth, even with up to 20 ships onscreen at the same time."

A quick sesh at the controls bears this out. The game zips along at a fair rate on the in-house P120 and although I struggle with the control system at first, I soon navigate my way through the impressively animated hyper-space gates (which include a neat power-up feature). I even notch up a few kills before dying thanks to a kamikaze Ovon. "We're still working on the ai," John stresses. "It's the hardest bit. At the moment we're finalising the ts different weapons, finishing off the five-player ships and going through the structure of the missions. We've come up with a very helpful tool that we've christened Mission Description Language, which basically allows the level designers to implement changes very quickly. Although the game is essentially linear we've tried to make the missions as varied as possible: some will involve mining ore from asteroids, others escorting a convoy of Repton ships or bombing an Ovon mothership. Ultimately, we want to make the game-play as varied as we can and allow the player to go head-to-head over a network or modem and blast the hell out of other players. So far we're pretty pleased with what we've got."

I'm pretty impressed so far, though whether it'll give the forthcoming X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter from LucasArts and Gremlin's Sand Warriors and HardWar a run for their money remains to be seen. Guess we'll find out in March.

My First Experience Of Darklight Conflict began with a guessing game. "Guess what kind of game it is, go on," said Darklight's project manager. He started it up and showed me the intro sequence: a beautifully-rendered animation sequence, depicting several F-14 fighters launching from an aircraft carrier and dogfighting with some unnamed enemy planes.

"A point-and-dick adventure surrounding the effect of Indo-China's influence over the yog hurt-producing nations during the 1800s?" I replied, as on the ball as ever. As it turns out, I wasn't far off. Dorklight Conflict is the kind of space-based combat simulator that games like Wing Commander and Privateer hope to become when they grow up. (So you were miles away in fact? - Ed.)

Pineal glands

The reason a space-based combat game starts with a Top Gun-style intro is that just before it ends, one of the Hamcrikan pilots is abducted by an alien craft. In a kind of intergalactic version of a student exchange programme, the pilot has been taken from his home planet and thrust headlong into a huge alien war, fighting for a race known as the Reptons and helping them defend against the might of the evil Ovons (by the way, looking at the shape of the ships in the game, you would do well to think of the Reptons as giant frogs and the Ovons as huge killer ducks).

Apparently, these two races have actually been at it for aeons. (At a space dinner party, the Repton ambassador once called the Ovon leader a bit of a girl and the whole thing just ballooned from there, or somthing like that.) The reason they've decided to start using human pilots in their battles is that, having advanced the technological levels of their weapons as far as they possibly can, they now want to try and gain the element of surprise by using pilots who use unfamiliar tactics. But here's the really clever bit. The human pilot? That's you that is. I knew you'd be surprised.

Eye candy

When you start playing Darklight, it grabs your eyeballs with both hands, pulls them out of their sockets, gives them a thorough hammering and then puts them back completely frazzled and burnt out. The graphics are that good. Every time I've played it in the office people walking past have said things such as: "Christ, look at that, that's impressive", and "Gadzooks, thou art playing me for a simpleton to expect me to believe those are real" and "What are the in-game graphics like?"

The thing is. they are the in-game graphics. Throughout, Rage have aimed to make all the presentation screens, mission briefings, equipment lists - and even the credits screen - use the same graphics as in the playable segments. The idea is to try and avoid the age-old problem of making things look far too nice before the game starts and then disappointing when you take off. The trouble is. to pull this off, the in-game graphics need to be pretty damn smart. And they are.

Oi, gameplay!

Yeah, yeah. Graphics be damned if the game doesn't play, as my wizened old grandmother used to say before she was carted off to the Cosy Pines Sanatorium For The Criminally Deranged. This is one of those arguments that falls into what Late Show reviewers like to call a 'grey area' when you start dealing with 3D action games. For me. the more real something looks and behaves, the better the atmosphere it can create and the more you feel like playing it.

Darklight isn't just a case of the graphics looking good and nothing else. The advanced systems Rage have used mean that when you blow something up. it explodes with terrifying realism. The particle explosions look great and feel real. The frame rate has been kept high enough to make sure you never think that your PC has suddenly turned into a 386SX by mistake. And I mean never. I've been playing all sorts of missions that involve huge numbers of ships, missiles and other alien thingies flying about at one time, but I've yet to encounter any form of spasmodic jerking of any kind (except in my own frail bones. Where are my pills?).

But what do you do?

The story takes place over 50 or so missions. Unlike other more 'worthy' space combat games (you know who you are), Darklight isn't trying to be a mighty space epic starring every B-list Hollywood reject in the book and directed by jumped-up graphic artists. It's an arcade action game. Plain and simple. It gives you the requisite intro animation, the requisite final animation at the end and nothing except Grade A quality gaming fun and joy in between.

You start with a handful of training scenarios, designed to get you used to the different aspects of space combat, and then you're thrown straight into the Repton/Ovon war. This involves simple dogfights, base defending, asteroid clearing, bombing runs and ore mining.

Although the mission structure is pretty rigid (fail a mission and you have to do it again until you get it right), there's quite a bit of variety in the overall game. Maybe not quite enough for some people, but it should keep most people interested right through until the end.

Where's Mark?

In one sense, it's that lack of pretension that helps make Darklight Conflict as playable as it is. Rage must have set out to make a damn playable game and that's exactly what they've managed to do. It wouldn't have hurt it to have a little bit more weight, but it doesn't suffer for it Do you follow?

I hope so. The underlying truth is simply that Darklight Conflict is as playable as any space combat engine that has ever existed. It's easily on a par with the old X-Wing and TIE Fighter games, it's easily better than the somewhat flat Wing Commander engine, and it's much smoother and nicer than Privateer.

Finally. I guess you just have to decide whether or not you really want a huge storyline with your action.

You know how there are moments in life that leave you unfulfilled? Fun-size Mars Bars. Bruce Willis films. Sex. Well, Darklight Conflict is like that. At first, everyone was stunned by the graphics - not a 3D card in sight and yet it still looked better than similar games of the time. It also had a good combat engine - none of your Newtonian laws of physics here.

But that was all it had. Some might say good graphics and a good engine are enough. Fools. Darklight Conflict suffers from a lack of ambition. Games such as X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter or Wing Commander have a reason for you doing the derring-do. Darklight just puts you there and shrugs its shoulders, as embarrassed by the whole affair as you are. Which is a shame, because it deserves to be so much more. This seems to be Rage, the developers', stock-in-trade. Incoming is another example of stunning graphical quality slightly marred by having a run-of-the-mill arcade game tagged on to it.

Basically, Darklight's gameplay as follows: "Look -there's some bad aliens that look like ducks; go and shoot them," and Jthen you're left to it for the rest of the game while it goes and has a coffee. There isn't even a storyline going on while you're doing it. You almost start looking for the 50p slot on the front of your PC after a while.

In its favour, age hasn't dulled its glossy sheen and now it's 25 quid cheaper than it was when it first appeared. Those of you on a budget and not looking for anything particularly deep or taxing may well be encouraged to give it a shot. Just don't expect Wing Commander.