The sound and the graphics are not perfect by any means in Dark Horizon but they are above average and better than a lot of games that claim to have state of the art technology.

Immediately after loading the game a beautiful movie file starts filled with both good sound and graphics. Something that got my attention from the very beginning was the fact that unlike most of the games on the market, the intro movie in Dark Horizon is black & white instead of color. Sometimes less is better and in this game's case, the intro movie file worked out wonderfully.

The other movie scenes throughout the game are in color (at least the ones that I have seen) and as a rule of thumb, they are generally good quality. In the movie files just as in the game, some space ships look better than other. It seems that the bigger the ship is the better the graphics are. The smaller ships are not badly designed per say, but I'm completely disappointed by the tracer effect of the engines. As for the battle sequences, they look great. The lasers, the missiles, the kinetic weapons and the explosions all look pretty good by today's standards. Even the background nebulas, planets and asteroid fields that you encounter in your campaign, while not perfectly designed, they do look good. Yes, the graphics could have been a bit sharper, but in general I have no complaints.

The sound is probably the game's best attribute. Once again, it is not perfect but Paradox Interactive put a lot more effort in Dark Horizon's sound compared with what other publishers and developers do to their games. The intro movie file gives a brief introduction to what's going on in the game. It is enough to draw us in but it is not enough to be overwhelming. In general, most of the voice acting is great. Some actors seem like they're trying just a bit too hard to fill in the role that they are playing, but when you have missiles chasing you down and evil aliens shooting lasers and photons at you from every direction, the last thing on your mind will be the quality of your wingman's voice acting. The action sounds are adequate but they are nothing spectacular per say. Explosions sound like explosions and the lasers sound about the same like they do in every other Sci-Fi game or movie. In this game's defense, today's technology develops much faster in the graphics department compared to the sound and it seems that for the last few years action sounds have almost come to almost a complete stalemate.