I really, really wish I could stop playing the same games over and over again.  I really do.  Sometimes, I think about all the great games out there just longing to be made, and then I pick up yet another third person shooter game and I think, why?  Why can’t I get anything but warmed-over hash like Dark Sector when there’s the next Fallout or Oblivion or Saints Row waiting to be made, but not being made?  But then I sigh and slap the game in my Xbox 360 and play on.

Dark Sector, today’s game of choice, is all about a special forces agent named Hayden who’s got a special disease that won’t let him feel pain.  Amazingly, this is a real disease, known as congenital analgia.  Anyway, Hayden’s been dispatched to Lasria, a Soviet Union offshoot that’s currently home to something called the Technocyte infection.  Technocyte is a disease that turns people’s skin into metal, and is so painful that it drives those infected with it utterly insane.  It’s not too surprising—the box art is going to make that clear enough—that it won’t be long before Hayden winds up infected with Technocyte too.  But here’s the kicker—because Hayden is incapable of feeling pain, the primary side effect of Technocyte, the whole insanity thing, bypasses him.  This means Hayden is now a living weapon, able to turn his skin into a massive three-bladed throwing star called a glaive.

From here, Hayden will go out and try to clear up the Technocyte infection from sweeping the rest of the planet and taking humanity into a new dark age.

This is, of course, a pretty interesting idea, and the storyline is definitely solid.  In fact, starting the game out gave me a lot of hope.  I took on an attack helicopter with a rocket launcher, for crying out loud.  Nothing says action like taking on a helicopter with a rocket launcher.  But then I got my shiny new Technocyte infection, and everything changed.  I could no longer pick up enemy weapons and use them, for example.  They’d put some kind of infection detector on the rifles and shotguns and such that caused them to “burn out” within seconds of my picking them up.  This meant I was taking on a small army with my sidearm (which didn’t have any Technocyte detector on it) and this absolutely idiotic glaive thing.  The biggest problem with the glaive is that it wasn’t a one-hit kill.  Amazingly enough, I could throw this gigantic three-blade boomerang into SOMEONE’S FREAKING SKULL and it wouldn’t be enough to kill them.  I’d have to hit them a second time, or get close in enough to use a finishing move.

If I wanted other weapons, I’d have to save up the roubles that I found scattered around the game play field to BUY them from a black market vendor who took out all the burnout circuitry.  This offended me.  Heaps of weapons, all throughout the play field, and I can’t use any of them for more than thirty seconds because my hand is a giant blade.

The best way to sum all this up is easy enough—Dark Sector was a decent idea that just got a really lousy execution.  It’s sad, because frankly, this game really could’ve been interesting, if it weren’t yet another third person shooter of the same stripe and pedigree that we’ve been seeing for years.