G4TV

There are games that are just plain bad.  Bad as in you play them, say it sucks, and move on.  There is another category of bad game that kind of fascinates, how it’s bad is something of a conundrum, why decisions were made just hang like aggravating mysteries over the experience.  Falling into this category are titles like Gladius, Advent Rising, and Gabriel Knight. Now there is one more addition, Starbreeze Studios’s The Darkness.

Tickle Me Emo

Based on a comic book from Top Cow, The Darkness is a series of great ideas that do not work for myriad reasons.  You play Jackie Estacado, a hood who’s the nephew of the big crime boss.  After dropping you smack dab into a car chase that probably causes the death of an entire Manhattan precinct and your driver, you calmly go about the original objective; killing someone at a construction site.  In the course of this, the screen can go blurry and a scary voice says menacing things.  Then you find a television that has a videotaped message from your uncle informing you that he’s always hated you and wants you dead.  Then a bomb explodes. “The Darkness” emerges from your body in the form of two malevolent snake-like entities, allowing you destroy people supernaturally. 

That’s the first hour.  And that’s the last time just about anything made any sense to me in this game.

The game has a story to be sure but the storytelling skills are stunningly lacking.  Apparently the Darkness is evil and has control over Jackie and he wants to destroy it, but I was at a loss as to why, it sure offers you some badass powers with no discernable deficit.  There are other sequences that explain the back story in a hellish World War One setting but all I could really glean from them was that the darkness was evil.  Worse yet the gameplay is so in the service of the story that moments that appeared to be major boss confrontations  turned out to be passive moments of interactive exposition.  In one case you find out that the trick is not to shoot the enemy, in another, astonishing decision at the game’s conclusion, you are treated to fully non-interactive moments of The Darkness’ power that demonstrates exactly what you wanted to do during the game and never did.

With Great Power Comes Sloppy Mechanics

Those powers are the main hook of the game, and they bring with them a lot of potential, of which very little is actually realized.  The concept is that the more dark the environment is, the stronger your powers.  Illuminated sections on the snake-heads are intended to help you gage how strong these powers are, but there’s no discernable correlation between the two, it’s about as opaque as the infamous health gages for the predator in the original Aliens vs. Predator.   Curiously that’s not the only similarity to that franchise.  The most commonly used power, where you extend one of The Darkness heads ahead of your body to open doors or make stealth kills, controls similarly to controlling the alien in those games, not really a good thing.   While it’s quite easy to disorient yourself, what truly gets in the way is the archaic physics and collision detection that make seemingly passable routes impassible.  In particular is furniture that you cannot pass under no matter how much space or how malleable you appear, the end result is jarring and decidedly clumsy.

The other powers are far less dynamic or useful.  A long tentacle is useful primarily to move puzzle objects and break lights, and a pair of oblique looking guns and the power to open up a vortex are also available but they seem so imprecise and beholden to significant darkness that you’ll be using them infrequently.   The game also lets you summon darklings, a quartet of creatures with unique abilities: explode, chock, shoot and berserker. They can be helpful in dispatching enemies but they are so weak to gunfire and light that they prevent any real strategic use.

At its heart, this game would appear to be a shooter.  Most of the action is determined by bullets, although the satisfaction from these encounters is nominal.  The weakest segment in Starbreeze’s previous The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, was a subterranean shooting sequence, and it would appear that they have made no changes to the gunplay mechanics.  The act of pressing the trigger, the gun firing, and the target getting hit feels so disconnected that you play in an almost perpetual state of anemic disengagement.  Why some shots kill and others don’t feel arbitrary. The spotty auto-targeting just makes the gunplay feel rote against A.I. that would be unimpressive in 2002.

Things Better off in the Dark

It’s not only the combat that feels lifted directly from Riddick, the graphics feel almost identical with perhaps one extra shiny coat of HD thrown on top.  This definitely makes the game suffer in comparison to any recent 360 or PS3 game, but it’s not the technical that’s the real image problem.  The look of the game is just unpleasant and ugly.  The streets of New York are absent of people while the subways are teeming with characters that may very well be auditioning for the next Condemmed installment.  While the under-populated claustrophobia was perfect for the sci-fi prison planet of Riddick, making NYC appear as if it’s been hit by the plague only heightens the aging engine’s limitations.

The game’s multiplayer doesn’t add much to the experience, a limited number of modes (CTF and deathmatch), uninspired level design, and the same awkward gun mechanics serve only to extend the problems apparent in the single player game.  The mixture of playing humans and a variety of darklings has some potential but is in no way fleshed out to offer any strategy.  It’s all pretty much just running and shooting wildly, trying to figure out if you’re hitting anything.

The Heart of Darkness

The Darkness is just an unfortunate game. I was looking forward to it, but left very disappointed. It’s completely playable. Being about 7 hours long helps but I spent the entire game waiting for it to get good, to make sense, to make a case for all the incongruous elements of design, gameplay and story, and then it ended.  To be fair though, I haven’t stopped thinking about it and I don’t even know if that’s a good thing either.

Article by: Adam Sessler
Video produced by: Adam Sessler