I'm a fan of space ships, lasers, "pew pew," and of course, explosions. What sort of science fiction fan would I be otherwise? Much to my sadness, the space simulator/shooter genre has been dying in recent years, so when I heard Dark Horizon was being released I couldn't wait to see how it turned out. Once installed I eagerly double clicked the icon, expecting to be launched into space and shooting down enemy ships faster than I could say, "I have you now." Instead, I was greeted with an error box telling me that my DirectX was messed up and I should reinstall the game. Several reinstalls later, said box was still plaguing my efforts to play, so I spent a little time on Google searching for a solution. A complete reinstall of DirectX, the game, and a reboot of my computer finally got me into the game.

The opening cutscene reminded me a lot of the older shoot 'em up style arcade games, with the dramatic "Mirk" slowly creeping across the galaxy as a threat to all beings living in it and the only person capable of stopping it is you, the player. It just didn't really matter to me because it was lost behind the flying, shooting, and crashes. Don't forget the many, many crashes. As a person who tends to alt-tab a lot to answer instant messages or check mail, I spent more time the first few days rebooting the game every time my habits got the better of me. There was a much larger story that the game was trying to tell me as I was playing. The background story was so dense as it was presented that it was too much at one time. I went into a mode of, "I have to read another wall of text?" and ended up skimming it for key words and points, not caring about the little details inside.

My greatest annoyance was finding out the game didn't really support my joystick. It only supported four buttons that I could tell, plus the throttle. The lack of support for twisting the handle of my joystick was very disappointing, considering the game allowed for maneuvers where the motion could be naturally applied. The game also tended to crash often when configuring the joystick too, which wasn't especially uncommon at this point.

All that aside, Dark Horizon did the whole, "point your guns at the enemy and shoot him until he explodes into atoms," thing really well. The scenery is absolutely gorgeous on the level of images you might see from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The environments weren't restrictive at all in any way, and they simply felt like space should feel, open and almost instilling a sense of vertigo. Big structures were big and I felt like I really was just a tiny part of a much larger universe. The enemy AI tended to be lacking, especially in dogfight situations. Instead of taking on some sort of evasive tactics when in combat, enemy AI would tend to fall back on jousting and ramming me instead, making killing them both easier and irritatingly difficult as I took just as much damage as they did. Wingmen, while providing amusing chatter, were usually worthless 99% of the time, their damage ineffectual in the rare occurrence it landed on the target.

I really wish that the game had been able to mesh their deep story and customization elements together with the beautiful gameplay. I spent quite a bit of time tweaking custom weapons and characteristics of my ship and felt that the mechanic was deeper than I was even taking it. Guns, weapons, engines, and defenses could all be tweaked with various goodies I would find out in the universe after blowing up everything in sight. Dark Horizon did manage to come up with one of the neatest mechanics I've seen in a space shooter. In addition to normal combat mode, there were two separate operation modes known as "shadow" and "corter." Both are utilized by controlling the heat levels of your ship. Cool it off far enough below standard mode and you enter shadow mode, effectively giving you reduced offense but also cloaking you to enemies. On the opposite end of the spectrum, corter mode was achieved when overheating your ship so that your damage output was greatly enhanced, but it rapidly dealt damage to your ship. Both modes were useful at times within the game, but corter was by far the most deadly, as entering a fight with it essentially meant you would take double damage.

Ultimately, Dark Horizon did a lot of things well. It had a fun shooter platform, gorgeous environments, plenty of story and customization, and unique game mechanics. The problem was it failed to reconcile them all into one game. Each could have stood alone fairly well but they never quite meshed to make the game work. Constant crashes and lack of good joystick support left me feeling excessively annoyed as well, and I would recommend the game only to die-hard space sim/shooter fans or people who would love to tinker endlessly with their ships. At roughly 10 hours of gameplay, not including crash time, it's short and easily beaten, even on the highest difficulties.