When I was a kid, I had a PS2. Unlike the absolute sicko I have since become, I didn’t feel the need to immediately upgrade to the PS3. I held onto my PS2 until late 2009 when an in-store demo for Batman: Arkham Asylum convinced me that I needed to upgrade.

In those three years, for whatever reason, my sister got an Xbox 360. She’s is not a gamer and wasn’t back then either, but she wanted GTA 4 so our parents got her one. It should be noted that when I asked for a PS3 in 2009 I was met by an immediate no from my parents, even though they had no problem shelling out for my sister to have a 360 that she barely used. I know you aren’t reading this Mom and Dad but just know that I never forget.

Anyway, on to the important part. My sister had precisely 4 games for her Xbox 360. GTA 4, Halo 3, Gears of War, and 1 vs 100. The best of those was 1 vs 100, but that’s a discussion for another time. The one I played the most was Gears of War.

Gears of War is really cool. It was then, and it still is now. Unfortunately for young me, the PS3 does not have Gears of War or anything even close to it. So, whenever I wanted to play a cool third-person shooter, I would go and play Gears of War. That is, until my sister got rid of the 360 and the games. I didn’t care of course because I had my PS3 with my Uncharted and Infamous, and Ratchet and Clank, and so on. But every now and then, I would get the itch.

The problem with getting a Gears of War itch when you have a PS3 is that you’re never able to scratch it, and itches that can’t be scratched are like reverse orgasms. They just build and build until you can’t take it anymore, except the payoff is bad.

So, every now and then, I would resort to looking up a list of all the cover-based third-person shooters available for the PS3. I, of course, already had Uncharted and would gradually build up my roster to include things like Vanquish, Spec Ops: The Line, Wanted: Weapons of Fate, SOCOM 4, and Binary Domain. But there were always a few that always showed up on all the various lists that I never ended up getting around to. One of these was Dark Void.

I couldn’t tell you why I never ended up getting Dark Void. If you ask the internet, I made a good choice, but if everyone listened to everything they read on the internet, then we’d be seeing the rise of fascism take over our society. And that would just be ridiculous.

It’s a third-person shooter where you have a jetpack. That’s all I knew about it for 15 years, and that’s all I needed to know about it to keep it in my mind for that time period. Why did it take me 15 years? I’ll never be able to say. Some games on your backlog have a long history and lore behind not being played, and some are just on it. Dark Void is the latter.

But now that I’ve played it, I can finally say, after 15 years, that out of all the games ever released in the 7th generation of video games, Dark Void sure is one of them.

This is a game that exists and was mostly forgotten, and there’s a reason for that. It is the definition of what the hip folks call “mid.” It’s not bad, but it’s so thoroughly mediocre that it might as well be. The only thing this game has going for it is the base concept, and even that gets buried under a mountain of meh.

Dark Void takes place in the 1930s, a little bit before World War 2. I don’t know the exact year because frankly, I don’t remember it. The game just isn’t memorable in any way, and for a game that’s part The Rocketeer and part Battlestar Galactica, that’s the biggest indictment against it. This concept deserved better.

You play as Will, voiced by Nolan North, because it’s a game from the 7th gen and he was legally required to voice 75% of game protagonists. Will is a pilot of some kind, and he has a female companion whose name I cannot remember. I’m pretty sure they’re ex-lovers, but don’t quote me on that. Will flies his companion, for a reason that I again do not remember, into the Bermuda Triangle, where they crash onto an island. They are quickly attacked by futuristic robots.

It turns out that the Bermuda Triangle is actually a gateway into the Void. The Void is the space in-between the human dimension and the dimension that the robots are from. Also, the robots are actually stingray-looking alien slugs in robot suits. For some reason, Nikola Tesla is in the Void and he gives Will a jetpack that turns him into the rocketeer. Will then begins helping the human resistance fighters that inhabit the Void, because they can’t figure out how to escape it, and I wish I could tell you more. Not that you care.

The story is told in such a slapdash way that nothing matters and there’s no reason to care. I don’t know who Will is beyond a smart-ass Nolan North stock character. I don’t know why Nikola Tesla is there. I mean, at one point, Will’s lady friend goes missing, and he joins the resistance to try and find her, but then she just shows up again on her own. She just flies into Resistance HQ, and it’s all ok and onto the next thing.

I love it when future technology is introduced to a historical setting. Steampunk is cool. Dieselpunk is cool. The Rocketeer is cool. Seeing people from the 1930s flying around like they’re Iron Man is fun. Seeing what robots would look like if they were made in 1948 is fun. Making the Bermuda Triangle an interdimensional plane where you fight 1930s-looking alien robots while flying on a jetpack should be cool and fun. It’s boring. It even looks boring because this came out in 2009, and all games in 2009 were legally required to be some combination of brown and gray.

Gameplay doesn’t fare much better.

There are essentially three main modes of gameplay here. The first is your standard cover-based shooting. It’s fine. That’s it. It’s fine. Your jetpack is meant to make these encounters more dynamic by allowing you more verticality to flank or find better positioning. But many of these encounters are indoors, and the jetpack is so finicky to control in these confined spaces that it’s not worth it when staying behind one cover and spraying ammo is an effective strategy.

The second mode of gameplay is vertical cover shooting. In these sections, you use your jetpack to maneuver up platforms and hang underneath them to use as cover. These sections are actually a pretty ingenious way to use the game’s concepts to offer something fresh to the genre. And the first few times you do it, it’s cool. But it gets repetitive fast since all of these sections basically have the same layout. It’s a great idea with mediocre execution, which may as well be the game’s main thesis.

The final mode of gameplay the game has is dogfights. They give you an open area to fly around on your jetpack and engage enemy saucers. You can even hijack saucers and fly them as well. These sections are mostly ok, they can be decent fun, but again are cratered by baffling design decisions. When you’re just flying around on your jetpack, you are a glass cannon, and the sauces have pinpoint aim. For some reason, barrel rolling is mapped to flicking both thumbsticks simultaneously in the direction you want to roll. So you’re gonna want to hijack enemy saucers, but to hijack enemy saucers, you have to complete a God of War-style quick time button mash that lasts so long you never want to do it more than once. To top it off, you can still get hit by other saucers while you’re doing the 9-hour quick time event to hijack one, so you can even die while doing this.

The game is best when it combines all three of these gameplay modes. Having you go from air combat to ground combat to the vertical cover sections, without any of them lasting long enough for you to realize they aren’t that good. It’s unfortunate for Dark Void that it doesn’t take long, since even when you’re having fun, the game’s Achilles heel will wear you down fast.

Enemies are bullet sponges. They take so long to die. Even basic enemies. Sure, they’re robot aliens, and you are a mere human, but even the alien weapons take almost a full clip to kill an enemy. The game even has a weapon upgrade system that doesn’t seem to quicken your ability to kill enemies. I fully upgraded my assault rifle to shoot explosive rounds, and it still took almost a full clip of ammo to kill basic enemies. I’ll repeat that. EXPLOSIVE ROUNDS. It should not take a full clip of explosive rounds to kill basic enemies. It’s annoying, it artificially prolongs firefights, and it frankly just gets boring fast.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, I did not finish Dark Void. According to the internet and the achievements list, there are 14 levels. I completed 9 and a half before I gave up. It’s not a long game. How Long to Beat puts it at about 7 hours. Normally, I could power through even a mediocre game with a playtime that’s short. But this one is just so dull that I just couldn’t do it. Halfway through level 10, I was emptying an entire clip of ammo into an enemy without them dying, and I just had to ask myself. “Is this worth it?” and it isn’t.

I’m usually pretty lenient on middling games, especially if they’re short, but they have to give me something. A story that’s interesting, a character I’m invested in, even just gameplay that’s fun. Dark Void has none. It just exists. It is itself a void.