I finally got around to playing Starbreeze Studios’ The Darkness last week. I played the demo back in Fall ’07, but decided that aside from its awesome intro I didn’t really want to play it. Recently however, I noticed it was mentioned a few times on Mitch Kraptas’ blog. His review and various comments were enough for me to give it a second chance.
My initial reason for not wanting to play was the aiming felt kind of loose and the movement was very sluggish. This is still the case, but the game offers so much more than the demo if you give it some time. The main gameplay mechanic that sets it apart from other shooters is of course your darkness powers. As soon as you get them you’ll pretty much have to use them for every encounter thereafter. They provide you with a shield and you’ll drop pretty fast without it. Aside from that you also get four special powers over the course of the game. To start you get a creeping snake thing that you can use for stealth kills from a distance. Later you get an arm that can stab people and break lights easily. Finally you get some special guns and a black hole that pretty much kills anything near it.
The powers will work perpetually as long as you are in a dark area and not consistently taking fire. The demon serpent things sticking out of you will automatically suck up darkness to recharge. This makes for an interesting mechanic that turns annoying almost immediately. Every light in the game can be broken to create darkness, but trying to shoot out a streetlight in the middle of a firefight can be tedious and tiresome. This problem is eased somewhat once you get the demon arm ability though.
What really sold me on the game however was not the gameplay. It was fun, but quality shooters these days are a dime a dozen and there are plenty of better ones out there. The games story really set it apart and was told in a few clever ways.
First of all, every loading screen was a short video of the protagonist standing in smoky shadows talking. If something story related just happened he may say a quick anecdote about that. Otherwise he’ll say something unrelated or just stand there menacingly with his guns. I found it to be a very interesting way of providing insight into your character. I thought of them as his inner monologue.
Next is the games intro and ending. The intro puts you in the back seat of a car during an epic chase from the cops through a tunnel. By the end you end up going against traffic, seeing the dude in the passenger seat get smashed against a truck, and shooting a construction worker off of the windshield. It is an exhilarating way to start the game and was really well done.
The ending luckily was equally as good. Throughout the entire game you are battling not only against your enemies, but also over control of yourself. The Darkness needs a vessel in which to survive, so even though you can currently use his powers, his ultimate goal is to take your body for himself. As the game draws to a close he gets ever nearer to that goal. Starbreeze implements this by wretching control from you during your final assault. The screen flashes in and out between black and scenes of the Darkness utterly destroying your enemies. Some parts allow you to shoot them, but not to control the Darkness powers. After awhile the game gives you control back and you can walk through the carnage that the Darkness wrought, cleaning up the leftovers. I found it to be one of the cleverest uses of what is essentially just a cutscene ever. Taking control from the player is generally frowned upon, but the way this tied into the story and the subtlety of allowing you to fire your gun at parts and control the camera worked perfectly. I felt helpless against the Darkness, but still felt like I was the protagonist being forced to watch as the monster controlling me did his bidding. It was a pretty excellent effect.
The voice acting really tied the whole thing together. There were a couple pretty terrible voices, but the main character was spot on. You really understood how important certain people and traditions were to him and his eerie calm when discussing his plot for revenge was incredibly fitting. On top of that, the voice of the Darkness was quite well done. It always managed to boom through, with the use of scratchy looking subtitles and a few other visual cues you were always immediately aware that the Darkness had something to say.
All in all, the Darkness is definitely worth a playthrough if you haven’t yet. It’s not too long and its annoyances are more than made up for through the storytelling. While the gameplay is not as solid as it could be it holds its own and the new powers are paced out evenly enough that it never starts to feel stale. There was also a multiplayer mode, but I didn’t check it out. I can’t imagine anyone is still playing it almost two years since release. One things for sure, after hearing so many good things about Riddick on the original Xbox and after playing this I sure am looking forward to Assault on Dark Athena. Starbreeze seems to be the one of the few studios capable of a solid franchise adaptation out there.
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