Jackie Estacado is just a regular guy who celebrates his 21st birthday at the start of the game. He visits his girlfriend at her new apartment and together they watch a movie. But he is troubled. When his girlfriend asks him about it he reassures her and tells her that there were some problems at work. What he doesn’t tell her is that his foster uncle Paulie, the don of a mafia syndicate ordered a hit on him. He also fails to mention that as of that day his body is no longer his own – he is sharing it with a dark entity called the Darkness.
The player experiences the whole game from Jackie’s eyes Starbreeze studios, the guys that delivered the great although strangely overlooked Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay took the world and characters of a comic book that was popular in the 90s and turned it into one of the most brutal first person shooters ever released. But The Darkness is more than just a pure FPS game. Between the various firefights and rooftop chases you will meet your friends, talk to strangers on the subway, watch youngsters bust their moves for money and blow out candles on a cake. Heck, you can watch entire movies on the various TVs found across the game. It is these little details that make this game so lifelike. Most of them are purely aesthetical, but some of them help flesh out the various characters found throughout the game. If you cared about Alyx in Half Life 2: Episode 1 because of her lifelike behavior, be prepared to re-experience similar feelings for some of the characters found in this game. I am not one to get immersed into games, but there were several occasion within this one where I was cursing the antagonists out loud. Worse, I developed feelings for them. Hateful feelings, but feelings nonetheless.
One of the major reasons the game is so successful at being so immersive is that except for some of the mundane actions such as climbing ladders the player experiences the whole game from Jackie’s eyes. And contrary to most games, players are able to see Jackie’s body, making the whole experience even more realistic. A scene early on gives you the chance to sit on a couch, with your girlfriend in your arms. The thing doesn’t beat having a real girl over, but in terms of video games, this is as close as it gets to experiencing someone else’s life.
Two demonic snakes growing out of your shoulders So far this is sounding like first person version of The Sims, so let’s get down to the more action oriented part of the game. For the first 30 minutes or so the game is just a regular FPS, basically a clone of Riddick set into a nighttime New York. The damage done by your weapons is fairly realistic and a direct shot to the head will instantly kill any opponent (most of the time at least). You yourself are pretty vulnerable as well, and staying in the open taking bullets will only work for the first encounter or two. In a direct head to head your opponents have as much chance to survive as you do, so staying in cover is your best bet.
That is, until a second entity enters your head. At first it seems that calling onto the Darkness to help you out is hardly worth the trouble, as the only ability you gain by doing it is the summoning of darklings from portals in the ground. Other than the coolness factor the two demonic snakes growing out of your shoulders provide there is hardly any reason to call on them at the start. Heck, if you wish to keep them present you have to destroy all the light sources in your vicinity, else they will disappear until you are standing in shadows and you call for them. Hardly worth the trouble, don’t you think? Wrong! When you summon the Darkness to aid you, you gain more than just abilities. You become a lot more resistant to bullets, especially for as long as you stay in the shadows. Employing one of the heads as a sort of spy drone is plausible as well, and you can re-experience your favorite Aliens moments by sliding along a wall and eating the brains of a poor unsuspecting guard. After the ritual is complete, as well as after every firefight it is recommended that you feed your two pet companions the hearts of the fallen foes. It sound gruesome and believe me, it looks even worse than it sounds, but if you wish your resident demon to grow in power, making his protection more effective you will have to get accustomed to the fact that the tentacles growing out of you need their share of blood to grow.
It doesn’t take long before you start gaining new Darkness abilities, such as summoning different kinds of darklings, each of them specialized for something. The chaingun wielding gunner and TNT packing kamikaze darkling look cool and do a great amount of damage, though you have to be careful around the two, as they are capable of killing you by accident. The last darkling you unlock is probably the most useful one, as his primary purpose is to destroy the lights in the area, saving you the trouble. This leaves us with the berserker darkling, the kind you can summon from the very start. They are melee fighters so in theory they should be the least effective assistants, but their amazing speed makes them probably the most helpful combat companions of the bunch. The fact that by finding secrets around the levels you can dress them up into construction workers or beggars (their attacks change accordingly as well) makes summoning them even more tempting.
But your evil abilities don’t end there. I’ve already mentioned the heart eating, the bullet deflection and the use of one of the heads as a scout/assassin. A few hours into the game the darkness gives you control over a 3rd tentacle, which can be used to impale enemies or items and then move them around. In combat this ability can be useful at close range, but I used it mostly to bust out lights and conserve the ammo. The third Darkness ability you gain are the Darkness guns, two pistols that use up darkness energy instead of ammunition. The guns pack a fair amount of damage, but you can usually cause more mayhem with regular weapons your find on fallen enemies. The last and final ability you gain more than makes up for the weak guns though. Summoning forth a small black hole makes you all but invincible, as no enemy can survive being close to one of the holes you summon. The tradeoff is that a black hole drains up your entire Darkness energy bar, making the Darkness disappear which in turn makes you extremely vulnerable to weapons fire.
Smoke trails coming out of the guns Certain games look better on pictures than they do in action, while others tend to look average in shots but amazing when played. The Darkness is one of the latter, looking like a slightly upgraded version of Chronicles of Riddick. The low resolution textures stick out like a sore thumb, be it the environments, weapons or characters. In the game these issues don’t disappear magically, but thanks to some smart motion blurring and some well directed animation you will hardly notice them. And even if you do, you will soon forget about them when you see the amazing visual effects the game brings to the table. I have never seen smoke effects that would look so good – I ended up wasting bullets just because I wanted to play around with the smoke trails coming out of the guns. Fire effects are top notch as well. But most importantly, especially for a game that relies heavily on staying in the dark are the dynamic lighting and shadows. The Doom 3 engine might hold the crown in this department, but The Darkness comes in as a close second. Some might even consider the effects in this game to be better, as all the characters are self shadowed with soft shadows, whereas the environments only cast hard stencil shadows, similar to the ones found in Doom 3.
The voice acting in the game is superb as well and makes some of the scenes look like they belong in a high profile Hollywood movie. The guns sound authentic as well and the voice of the Darkness is suitably distorted and evil. The soundtrack is composed mainly of high speed metal pieces which kick into action during firefights while the exploration parts are accompanied by slow, calming organ chords.
This leaves us with the multiplayer. Things are rather basic here and for the most part multiplayer matches feel the same as they do in other games. You can play as a darkling and zip around the levels at amazing speeds (in contrast to the painfully slow movement when on foot, be it in single player or multiplayer), but other than that the multiplayer here doesn’t deliver anything new. Truth be told, it feels as if it was added as just an afterthought.
Conclusion In FPS games you usually hide in shadows out of fear of being spotted. This is not the case here. You stay in the cover of darkness because that is where your power lies. You may be a regular guy out in the street, but when fighting in a small, unlit alley you become the hunter and even an entire band of enemies is no match for you. You can smell their fear as your mawing tentacle rips of the head of one of them while you comfortably wait in the shadows. And just when they think things can’t get any worse you jump out, guns blazing, tentacles flailing with a host of darklings at your back. No, in The Darkness you will never hide because you would be afraid. You will hide because all boogeymen hide, especially when they thirst for blood.
Gameplay
89/100
It’s a FPS with a twist. Sooner or later you’ll probably start killing off enemies for the pure pleasure of it. Yikes!
Graphics
90/100
Blurry textures mar the otherwise amazing visuals. The animation is for the most part flawless as well.
Sound
85/100
Good voice acting and a good choice of sound track songs. None of them will go down in history as something special though.
Value
78/100
It takes roughly 8-10 hours to play through the game for the first time. Finding all the secrets (and unlocking entire comic books) will take time though.
Multiplayer
63/100
Very basic and hardly innovative. On the 360 you at least have the integration with Xbox Live!
Overall (not
an average)
87/100
The game some minor flaws, but overall it is one of the best FPS games released in the last year or so. You’ll probably have fond memories of events in the game years from now!
