The pre-rendered backgrounds are often wonderfully well done, and do a great job of setting the scene in such a way that you believe you could well be in the world described by the story. People are less well done. They are jaggedly polygonal for the most part, but it is no worse than Tomb Raider for example. The various cut scene movies inexplicably look far worse and of lower resolution than the game itself. One wonders why Kalisto did not chose to use the game engine itself to create the movies, as was done in Mysteries of the Sith .
Music is rare in the game, although it makes a few appearances to good effect.
Sound was, on the whole, a bit disappointing. Combat sounds are weak, and the voice acting is variably acceptable and truly awful. Still, Dark Earth is no worse than the average game in this regard, just nothing exceptional. The manual was less than stellar. It is fairly beefy, but most of it is taken up with back story information on the society and creatures of Dark Earth .