Game had so much promise but it has so many bugs and fails in code that playing this give's total disappointment. Eg. playing same mission for over 20 times just to get it go right way without chrashing AAAAARGH! If there is a patch that add more stability for game play and doesn't mix your save games then I'll give 2 stars more.

Initially it looks like a good game. The setting and story is interesting, graphics are good and lots of voice-overs add to the atmosphere. Gameplay is good, too.

Unfortunately zhe constant interruption by game-breaking bugs and annoyances ruins it. The list of severe bugs is quite long: input randomly not responding, constant piercing missile warning sound that wouldn't go away even in subsequent missions and chapters, horrible collision detection that gets you stuck in friendly ships and kills you, arbitrary mission failures, enemy fighters can pass through battle cruisers but you can not, alt-tab crashes the renderer, broken player profiles that crash the game if you load previous savegames, crashes in scripts that cause the game to exit, random crashes during loading screens, collisions during cut-scenes that leave you severly damaged and a slew of cosmetic issues. In the end I spent more time replaying missions due to bugs and trying to troubleshoot them than actually playing the game.

Dark Horizon could have been a great space combat game. Unfortunately development appears to have stopped in early alpha stage. Even the most recent patch doesn't change that. The game is effectively broken at one point (cannot continue past mission 19 unless you use cheats and manually fix savegames) and there haven't been patches for known bugs in years.

This game is a bit of a mixed bag.

The good:

Graphics! Rather nice-looking space battles and scenery, starscapes and surroundings. Good effects.

Customizable ships. You're able to customize your ship to a considerable degree, you'll earn enough salvage after a number of missions to make the 'ultimate' weapons and modules in addition to selecting from a wide range of premade versions.

The bad:

The story. Something must have gone wrong in translation, the story is nigh-impossible to follow and uses expressions that I doubt were meant to be understood by anyone outside of the developer team.

Sound. During battle, I've found that there's a premade 'fight sound' track going on that has sound effects of weapons firing. This wouldn't be bad unless for the fact that this has very little to do with the intensity of the battle, leading to sounds of fire streaking just past your ship when enemies are barely in sensor range. The music is otherwise decent.

I'll give this game a weak three of five star rating due to the several flaws that are obvious.

Being a fan of combat space sims, I'm a little biased but feel Dark Horizon is a pretty good game. The graphics are top notch. The storyline, while a little confusing, is pretty interesting.

First the game's engine. It has plenty of problems. It runs kind of slow on my crappy computer, but it's hard to attribute that to the game or my computer. Next, it's difficult to change your keys. I use a Logitech Freedom 2.4 Cordless joystick and had to manually edit some configuration files to get it to work, and I still could not remap ship roll to joystick twist, as well as strafing to the joystick's POV; for those, I had to use xpadder (a gamepad/joystick to keyboard mapping program).

Next, regarding the game's engine/programming, I've had some weird save game issues but overcame them. For some reason, the last saved game is wrong (load the one before it).

Be careful when choosing your ship loadout, because it seems you can't go back unless you replay the mission before it!

The game's difficulty is next. It's hard. Be prepared to replay a mission multiple times! But that doesn't mean it isn't fun; it's quite satisfying to get through a mission. I found the most effective, yet tedious, method of completing a mission is to attack when you're not targeted and immediately run and dodge, while cooling down to "invisibility" mode, when you get targeted.

The combat (which is basically all the game is), is quite fun and exhilarating. DH has an interesting mechanic, "Temperature", where you can literally heat or cool your ship which provides faster rate-of-fire or radar invisibility, respectively. Those come at the cost of shields or speed and ROF, again, respectively.

As mentioned, you can customize your ship's loadout. I have no idea if there are resources or anything so I basically have been choosing the best stuff and going with that.

All in all, I gave it 4/5. It has some issues but they've all been overcome. I wouldn't recommend this game to a non-space-sim fan.

Bought the game as part of a package deal. I must say I'm glad it was only 3$, granted I would have rather spent it on gas at this point. The game is unplayable. It will not go past the Hangar without crashing my vid drivers (8800 GTS).

This is basically Tarr chronicles 2. It's multi-chapter mission based space combat. Same confusing "upgrade" system with 3 disassembles per chapter. Controls are confusing at times (but you can change the keys at least) and all enemy ships try to ram you (bad AI).

The learning curve is steep as not much of anything is explained.