Dark Void is currently in development by Airtight Games for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. A bunch of the guys working on it were also involved in the creation of Crimson Skies, which you might remember as a pretty cool arcade aerial fighter, released early on the original Xbox.

The story of Dark Void is intriguing: You’ve been sucked into the Bermuda Triangle and have popped out in a world overrun by aliens trying to wipe you out. Details were a bit light, but basically you’re joining up with a human resistance trying to battle your way to freedom.

There are two major features that were demonstrated - vertical combat and mid-air action. You’ll start out with a weak rocket pack that lets you hover and make short jumps - just enough so you can scale some of the big mesas that abound in this alternate universe. Once you end up at the base of one of these, the view flips around and suddenly you’re making your way up the cliff, boosting your way from handhold to handhold as you fight your way to the top.

Of course, while you’re doing this, aliens are trying to blast you off the wall face, so you’ve got to take cover and shoot back.

The game uses a cover system that will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s played Gears of War, though using the third dimension makes for some interesting additions (if you’re hanging onto a ledge with an alien standing on top of it, you can grab their legs, knock them down, then just yank them over the edge for an easy kill). Though in doing this there is an inherent danger so you’ve got to make sure you don’t get knocked off either.

The flying feature doesn’t kick in until a bit later (once you upgrade your rocket pack), but when it does what was previously a walk-shoot-climb game takes on a new, ah… dimension. You’ll zip around the air, dodging flying saucers, shooting between the mesas in a display startlingly reminiscent of The Rocketeer. This looks lush and if you’ve played Crimson Skies, you’ll notice the similarities

The next part of the demo showed how to hijack one of the flying saucers. When one of them does a close flyby, you can just grab hold of it and work your way around to a maintenance hatch to try and crack it open.

While you’re doing that though, you’ll have to dodge incoming fire from a turret in the centre of the saucer, but once you’ve done that you can hoist out the pilot and assume control of the vehicle, and then you’re buzzing around in style and out of all that wind and direct sunlight that would really only add to your other problems.

Built on the third iteration of the Unreal Engine, the game has pretty much everything you could want in terms of graphics. It’s still a whiles away from shipping - I noticed a few painful frame-rate dips in a couple scenes which I’m sure will get ironed out - but it’s looking pretty flash already.

While the vertical combat stuff is neat, I wouldn’t rate it as something to write home about on its own, but combined with the freedom of full flight gives this game a couple of heavy hitting features that make it stand out. Definitely still needs some spit and polish but shaping up nicely so far. Check out our AusGamers Dark Void game page for more media and information.