The Darkness

The Darkness, an obscure comic from Top Cow Productions, comes to life courtesy of Starbreeze studios, the nearly as obscure developers of the well-received Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. If you were familiar at all with Chronicles of Riddick, you will have a good idea of what to expect from Starbreeze’s second game: an innovative and visceral first person shooter with open-ended elements interwoven throughout. Ironically, it is the innovative aspect of The Darkness - the open-ended structure - that ultimately detracts from the experience. However, what weaknesses there may be are subdued somewhat by a phenomenal presentation, fantastic gunplay, and some intriguing additions to combat.

You play Jackie Estacado, the nephew of your rather unpredictable and maniacal uncle Paulie. Jackie, once an orphan, was adopted by Paulie as a child. While fortunate, it was quite unfortunate that Paulie was a mob boss. For reasons not quite known, Jackie becomes a contract killer – a hitman – for Paulie. As inherently contentious a family and profession these are, there is a greater drama behind the scenes: Paulie and Jackie don’t get along. Paulie, fearful and paranoid, tries to “off” Jackie on his 21st birthday, and thus triggers the manifestation of the Darkness – a demon within Jackie, passed on generation to generation, that lay dormant until now. Jackie survives, which is ironically a tragic turn, as the bull’s-eye moves from Jackie to what he values most: His girlfriend Jenny. What follows is an otherworldly revenge story steeped in bloody violence, love lost, and even suicide. The Darkness certainly earns its title.

With such heavy subject matter, the game could have spiraled into something rather unbearable, or even cliché. However, The Darkness is a spectacle of technically proficient and artistic presentation. Told nearly exclusively in first person perspective, The Darkness never breaks rank or removes the person from the experience. While seemingly limiting, what Starbreeze manages to do with such a narrow style is very impressive. Upon experiencing the very first opening scene – a car chase through a New York tunnel – you’ll be floored by a rush of clever design, slick graphics, and fantastic voice acting. As you barrel through the tunnel in the backseat of a convertible, you are able to fully control where you are looking (with the exception of a few key moments).

Technically speaking, the game looks really great: sharp textures, great character models, fantastic animation and special effects. What’s more, it is all touched with a style befitting the theme, as though the world were being viewed through a twisted, darkly lens. In fact, there is but one brief moment where the game is played in daylight. Otherwise, the world, set mostly in real world New York City, is played exclusively at night. The only flaws in The Darkness’ presentation are the lip-syncing and facial animation, which are quite poor in comparison to everything else.

Starbreeze is at pains to fill the game with many smallish details that further the immersion. Animation plays a big role. There are plethoras of little flourishes that bring Jackie’s perspective to life. During loading sequences, you’re treated to little cinematic shorts, mostly taking the form of Jackie standing repose under a single light in the darkness, delivering little soliloquies to an uncertain audience. Jackie’s repose is punctuated with slick animation that avoids exaggeration, and plays it subtly, naturally. This might be a first for a videogame, and thoroughly impresses. In game, Jackie’s weapons sway and swagger in a way that is believable. Although this may seem like a very small thing, the fact that Jackie points his guns straight up when he is facing a wall gives you a real sense of presence, as if you’re actually occupying space. Best of all, once the Darkness manifests itself, you are in for a real treat. The tentacles and serpentine eel-like heads that spring forth writhe convincingly and menacingly. The eels (for lack of a better term) occasionally snap at each other. When devouring a heart (more on this later), the eels gulp down, toss around, and sometimes even play tug-a-war with the hearts lending them a frightening personality all their own.

Voice acting is also a considerable stand out. Every single character you meet is fully voiced, and few are played poorly. Of the main characters, the voice actors were cast perfectly, with the voice of the Darkness stealing just about every scene he pipes-up in. When you hear the guttural, sloppy, growling Darkness announce himself in full surround sound for the first time, you might just wet your pants. It is that good. Suffice to say that other developers playing this game must feel compelled to bring along a pen and notepad so that they can glean from it all the best parts in what might as well be a benchmark setting presentation.

While the presentation is fine, the gameplay itself hits some right notes too. The gunplay might just be the best aspect of the gameplay overall. As mentioned, the guns animate well and pack a punch: Each shot fired is an event unto itself. Starbreeze opted for a less conventional first person shooter way of dealing with the guns as well: When the gun runs out of bullets, Jackie simply drops the gun - there is no reload function. It’s an interesting way of handling a “reload” system that seems entirely appropriate given the setting: Jackie is not a formally trained marksman, and thus deals out his punishment in a less proficient, dirtier manner. With the bullets flying, Jackie dropping guns and pulling out ones from his reserve, and trails of smoke emitting from the barrels, it is definitely one of the most frantic and emotionally expressive use of guns I have ever seen. It helps too that your enemies take one hell of a beating, taking Jackie’s bullet ridden retribution as forcefully as he can give it. Jackie is even capable of delivering fatality-like execution moves if he pulls the trigger pointblank on an enemy. One such execution involves kicking out the leg of your opponent thus dropping him to his knees, while firing multiple gunshots up his body and capping it off with one in the face. Getting the picture? While not the bloodiest or most disturbing game, it is extremely violent nonetheless. And that is not the end of it.

When the Darkness manifests itself, it brings along with it a brand new arsenal of weapons. Once you have killed an enemy, one of your eel-like appendages can plunge into the victims’ chest and tear out their heart… for what else? Eating! While not necessarily a weapon itself, it is useful for leveling-up, and presumably unlocking other Darkness powers (although it was not entirely explicit whether leveling up unlocked the powers or simply made you more bullet resistant). You start off with “creeping dark” which puts you in direct control of your eel appendage as it slithers along on the ground, on walls, and even ceilings. It is fantastic for stealth kills as you can strike your enemies with a fatal bite to the throat. The game also throws in a few puzzles here and there that can only be solved by using creeping dark. Equally as satisfying is the “demon arm” power, another lengthy tentacle appendage with a very useful sword/spear/cleaver on the business end of it. As you can imagine, the demon arm does quite a good bit of damage, useful in making either a quick strike or a more thorough impaling. As long as you are holding down the button, you can carry your victim, impaled, along in front of you, eventually flinging him aside. You can even do this with vehicles, carrying them along as mobile shields before launching them at a group of enemies. These darkness powers are as heavy hitting, visceral, and satisfying as the gunplay, although the other powers are not nearly as impressive.

The structure of the playground hosting all of this carnage is built like a hub system, a somewhat open world structure allowing you to visit and re-visit levels at whim. Subway stations act as these hubs, travelling to one or the other gives you access to certain areas in the game simply by walking above ground. These areas are city blocks of New York City, cordoned off buildings or other such obstacles. There is not, in other words, a fully realized city to freely explore. There are characters strewn about with back-stories and tasks for you to fulfill, like side-quests in your typical RPG. Although this fleshes out some gameplay, none are very compelling and some only involve speaking to another person. Your reward is typically a scrap of paper with a phone number on it that can be dialed via any pay phone that in turn unlocks extras like artwork and “making of” videos. After completing a few of these, I highly doubt anyone would be particularly motivated to pursue many more: they are just plain boring.

This structure is welcome in theory. Practically, at best, it provides another level of immersion, more characters to fill in some back-story, a respite from some of the grueling action, and a fresh take on what has become the norm in linear first person shooters. Unfortunately, this structure also seems to lend itself to what is possibly The Darkness’ biggest flaw: poor level design. In Starbreeze’s effort to create this open-ended believable recreation of New York-esque city blocks and enclaves, they must also have felt quite restricted in just how interesting or dynamic they could make the levels. Some levels quite literally take place on these city blocks with as much variety as turning a corner, taking cover behind a cop car, turning another corner, and then maybe entering a building. If you’re really lucky, you might even get to climb up a flight of stairs. Even when the game separates from reality and you enter the Darkness’ hell-like realm, this horrific fantasy setting doesn’t translate into great level design: running across wide open, fogged in expanses is not exactly a captivating journey, no matter how much atmosphere is soaking every last inch of the game. Such is the yin and yang of The Darkness: fantastic action set in very bland sandbox.

The sum of other niggling issues also does nothing to help forgive the poor level design. For starters, you are able to summon “darklings,” little impish demons that scurry about taking down enemies in gruesomely hilarious ways, but these darklings prove mostly useless and difficult to command. Enemies themselves are stupid: they are of the “run back and forth and shoot” variety. The best that can be said of your opponents is that they get shot well, violently jerking about and spouting fountains of blood from their new cavities. Did I mention this game was violent? Oh, right. There is also an inordinate amount of time blasting out light sources, and there are plenty of them. You see, the Darkness can only come out in the dark: if it stays out in the light for too long, it will simply sizzle and disappear, only to recharge itself again in the dark. It is all thematically consistent, but annoying in practice. Lastly, the game is too short. Even if you have played through a handful of side quests, the game could not have lasted much longer than six hours. Despite also hosting online multiplayer, it is comprised of the standard game type variety offering nothing more than what you would expect from the basest of multiplayer components. Actually, it does offer the rather unique ability to spontaneously transform into the aforementioned darklings, weaponless but able to move at great speed and along walls. Cool, but the fun is short lived.