The Gallup Gamer
The Darkness

By Matt Hinshaw
For the Independent

The Darkness was originally released in 1996 as a dark and evil heroic comic book series. The series was created by comic book icon Marc Silvestri along with Garth Ennis and David Wohl. Developed by Starbreeze Studios the same team that brought us the first person shooter "The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay" comes the mature, sinister, and vengeful game known as The Darkness.

Your path begins with you waking up in the back of a speeding car in New York City with a pair of mobsters yelling at you. Your character Jackie Estacado is a 21 year old gothic looking mobster with a hidden birthright known as The Darkness. After a joyride through a Manhattan tunnel you progress into a construction site where your Uncle Paulie has given you a gift for your 21st birthday, a bomb. From that point on it is revenge and eventual take over of the family for Jackie Estacado. Little does he know this is going to be a birthday full of death and destruction.

The Darkness first comes across as your standard FPS, first-person shooter, but it is not. There is the standard assortment of weapons such as dual pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles but they are not alone in your assortment of killing devices. The Darkness which manifests itself as basically two sinister serpents that pop out of your back, arms you with four different supernatural weapons, Creeping Dark, Demon Arm, Darkness Guns, and Black Hole. Creeping Dark is your stealth attack. It allows you to control one of the serpent creatures across the ground and into tight places. Demon Arm is a long tentacle looking thing that you can impale your enemies with or pick up cars and other large items through out the levels. Darkness Guns are special guns you are given in the Other World levels that let you kill the undead with one shot. Black Hole is the ability to conjure up a small black hole that you can suck a large group of enemies up into killing them. It is by far the most powerful of the four supernatural weapons.

In addition to your supernatural powers you can summon little creatures know as Darklings throughout the levels. There are four different types, Berserker, Gunner, Kamikaze, and Lightkiller. They are all designed to help you either kill your enemies or advance you through certain parts of the level by destroying walls or lights that hinder your progression. The Darklings come across as almost useless because they are difficult to control or they just do not listen to your commands which comes from a faulty AI. The best part about the Darklings is their entertainment value. When you have four of them up and running around they will insult each other, hit each other among other mischievous acts. If the developers spent as much time working on their humor AI as they did on their attack AI the Darklings could have proven useful in the game.

The Darkness uses all of the Xbox 360's processing power to make one graphically beautiful game. The levels are gritty and dark making the whole game feel evil. There are two different planes of existence you kill your way through. One of them is New York City the other is basically a never ending WWI with undead German soldiers fighting and torturing the lost souls of the allies. The four horsemen of the apocalypse even make and appearance in this hell driven plane of existence. It would have been nice to see some aspects of this alternate universe in the New York City levels but you can't have everything. Starbreeze tried to make the levels free roaming like in the "Grand Theft Auto Series" but they came up short. The only problem is that these areas are small and only offer you a chance to search for collectibles items. There are 100 collectables in the game and they are not that difficult to find if you spend the time searching for them. Along with the collectables you can search out costumes for your Darklings adding another level of searching.

The Darkness gets its power from staying in the shadows. It adds another level of protection for you and powers up your supernatural abilities. For being a game that takes place in New York in the dead of night there are quite a bit of lights around to cause your Darkness powers to drain their energy. I personally spent more time trying to shoot out the lights in the different levels than I did avoiding and slaughtering baddies. The enemies were easy to kill and their difficulty did not change the more powerful Jackie Estacado becomes. Instead they just throw more and more enemies to attack you instead of increasing their difficulty.

I hate to say it but the online multiplayer for this game is a joke. The only entertaining aspect is capture the flag. The levels are very small for eight people to be playing on and you do not even get to play as the lead character Jackie Estacado. You play as either a Darkling, a mobster, or a Darkling that transforms into a mobster. They all have their strengths and weaknesses like only mobsters can carry guns but darklings can leap extremely far. I played online a couple of times and gave up on it. I am almost positive that online play for the Darkness was an after thought.

We are currently in the summer of video games. Historically not many games let alone good games come out for the mainstream market until everyone is back in school. For being a summer game it is excellent. The Darkness looks great, controls well, and has an excellent story with shocking twists and never ending death and destruction. The enemies come off as too easy to kill and predictable. If you like a game that has very cinematic cut scenes, is graphically intense, with excellent voice acting this is a game for you. I do not recommend buying it because the single player is very short. It only takes about 8 to 10 hours to complete it and the multiplayer is a waste of time. If utter destruction and domination with a hint demonic imagery does not scare you then stop by your local video store and rent The Darkness. I give The Darkness a solid B. (On a rating scale of A-F with A being excellent and F being terrible.)

The Independent are trying out a weekly video game review column for the next two weeks. If you enjoy the review or if you hate it please feel free to send us your feedback, if you have any other video game related questions or comments please send them in too.

Please send all comments, questions, and feedback to "mailto:gallupgamer@gmail.com" gallupgamer@gmail.com