Tuesday 16 November 2010

The Darkness Review - Part 1

So. The Darkness. A game considered to have one of the worst demos ever made. But the whole game really isn't too bad. The storyline may just barely hold itself together, but it is interesting enough for me to want to keep going. I'm at the 55% mark, so i'm going to do half of the review now, and then do the last 45% when i've completed the game. So lets dig in.

The Darkness follows Jackie Estacado on his 21st birthday. After a very rushed and seemingly out of place car chase Jackie crashes out of the car, his companion tells him that his uncle has probably put out a hit on him for failing (I think) and after many minutes of wandering about you gain the so-called darkness powers. I like the darkness powers. They seem to contain the rather sly feel about them, while constantly showing their own power over Jackie.

After a couple of objectives walking to places, i'm going to go off on a rant in a bit so hold on, I got to the next big objective of burning some money to "Fuck up Paulie's operation". Why do most of these missions just include shooting henchmen with no redeemable qualities and burning things? The rant is about the tracking system as I should call it. In my Resistance 2 review I complained about how some of the objective trackers were useless and shouldn't have been there. But in this game, there is no local map, and no objective tracker. I got lost so many times trying to find where I had been directed to by NPCs.

So eventually the Darkness made my unable to save my girlfriend from being shot, and Jackie shoots himself. That came out of left field. He wakes up in some sort of World War II esque hell where the british are fighting Nazis to gain control of "The Hills". After some character exposition where you find out that it was Jackie's great, great grandfather who brought the darkness into the family and that it latches onto the firstborn male on their 21st birthday, but there is a way to control it. After another mission where Jackie goes to "The Hills" by himself, he retrieves the "Darkness Guns". Through these guns apparently the darkness can be controlled.

Insert here another train bit. Why does every game I play seem to have at least one train in it since I played Spirit Tracks? Jackie breaks free of hell since the darkness was apparently keeping his body alive so that it could survive. Jackie comes back and apparently his first matter of business is revenge! Oh wait, no. He has to go visit his aunt. He goes there and the aunt basically sets up the next two major missions where you have to kill the police chief to get to the main evil guy.

The Darkness does not deserve the horrendously bad reputation it has. Some people have said it was just unplayable, but cut it some slack. It was released when the PS3 first came out, and studios did not know what the console was capable of. You can ignore the modelling issues at least from that as well as the bad animation on the human models when they talk. As I mentioned before, the rest of the game will be reviewed when I complete it.

This is Tyramatt, signing off.

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