Dark Angel was a great little show on Fox, created by T2’s James Cameron and starred the beautiful Jessica Alba as Max, a genetically enhanced soldier in a post-apocalyptic near future. The first season of the television show was great sci-fi / action. The second season stretched a little and my interest waned, as did others, as a third season never popped up.

The Dark Angel game, available on the PS2 and X-Box appeared on the market months after the series went defunct. It was most likely in development before plans to cancel the series took place and Sierra decided to still release it.

At a full game price of $49.99 this is one of those titles to avoid like the plague, as the PS2 has just so many titles better in every way, shape and form. But if you can snag it previously played for a few bucks, it is worthy of a little bit of your time, especially for fans of the show.

The game centers on Max running, kicking and punching through cityscapes, military installations and the like, but really has no connection to the television series’ plot lines. The whole game has a sort of generic plot that is along the lines of the show, but doesn’t fit exactly.

The action and game play is not very deep, consisting of a combination of stealth moves and combat. The stealth is pretty lame when compared to other games already out there, like the Tenchu series, or our buddy Solid Snake from the Metal Gear Solid series. There is a danger level meter to let you know when guards are approaching and the like, but it changes almost instantly, making it impossible to react most of the time.

The combat can be pretty cool, with Max having a lot of combos and different moves, including doing flip kicks off of walls, and some cool grappling combos.

The scenery is pretty nice, though can get a bit repetitive. Combat is similar. The combat moves’ variation make for some good variation initially, but the fighting, including the encounters with level bosses gets monotonous after a few levels, as well.

One nice touch is that Jessica Alba and Michael Weatherly both do the voices for their characters, which is a nice welcomed addition, adding a little bit more to linking it up to the now canceled series.

Another note, the in-game and cinematic cut scenes renderings of Max don’t do justice to the beauty of the real life Jessica Alba, but in-game renderings never do, do they?

If you pay full price for this game, you are going to feel cheated and ripped off. If you can find it used somewhere for $9.99 like I did, it’s well worth $10, but not much more.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 19th, 2002 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Game Reviews, Gaming, PS2 Review, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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