I played The Darkness by Take Two games all the way through… and unfortunately have to give a game that could have rocked the shooter genre a lukewarm review. Here’s why.

First of all, why go through all the trouble of making a game with stellar graphics and gameplay, and then reducing down the instances of when you actually GET TO USE your crazy demonic powers on your victims? That above all is the one lamiety of this game that supercedes all others.

It is for this reason that a service like gamefly to rent games really buffers you from the colossal mistakes that developers make in games. Since the bar is so high now for the price of a new game, they better damn well be kick ass before I shell out the full price for them. The approximately 10 dollars i spent to play this game was well worth it, but I would honestly not spend a penny more on it. I got about 20 hours of gameplay (50c/hr, not bad…).. and could maybe get another 5-10 out of it if i played it again on a higher difficulty level, and maybe online … which i played for all of about 3 minutes… small rooms with too many people in them, and about 3 deaths a second.. not my bag. Yes, it’s cool that you can morph into a little snake critter and stealth about, but i’m telling ya, you get shot either way b/c the maps are so small and loaded with people. (I only had 6 people in the room so you can just imagine).

That being said, if you really do like what the character can do (which is truly groundbreaking for a shooter game.. i’ll get into it shortly), I could see why you would enjoy the live experience a bit more. Most of my time as I said has been playing the game all the way through, so that’s where i’ll focus the rest of the review.

So the story starts and you are this guy named jackie, in new york city. It opens up with you narrating your own story and saying ‘This was the first time I died’. I wont go into a huge amount of detail here but basicly you DIE, (no!!) and the story opens up about how you end up with this (shall i call it) daemonic possession which manifests itself (among other ways) as two huge snakelike arms that protrude from your body. Once gameplay starts, you find that these two little critters get hungry – for human hearts noless! …so everytime you kill someone you are offered the option to ‘devour heart’. rather grueseome animations for those but if you’re into that sort of thing (doesn’t really do it for me).. you will enjoy. Again, the game has stellar graphics, and was engineered very well, I never encountered the fabled freeze up on this puppy.

So as your going about merrily through your mission (which i wont even both to go into, it’s so stereotypical and bland (aside from your ventures to this other dreamlike world.. which you’ll have to play the game to find out about, i could write a short novel trying to explain it), you gain more abilities with your little snake friends.
the first ability you get is the ‘creep mode’ where you can basicly extend one of the snakes out into hard to reach areas and unlock doors, eat people, etc. this is nice b/c you can slither around a corner and eat gangsters before they know what hit em. The other cool aspect of this is that if you do get shot doing this, it doesn’t take any damage, just retracts the snake back to your body.

The next few abilities you get are the darkness guns (pretty friggin cool, endless ammo), the black hole, and the claw. I was a huge fan of the black hole, especially when things get downright nasty. you can manifest a nice black hole in front of several enemies and watch them get ‘sucked in’ (well not really, just tossed around and then dropped into a lifeless heap in front of you.. i assume they dont go in the hole so you can still eat their hearts, mmmm tasty).

The other ability you gain is the ability to summon little gremlin like critters that can do the following: gunner, lightkiller, berserker, and kamikaze. these little critters are really funny and do some hilarious stuff. many of them will pee on the carcases, they all have nice witty banter, and can be very helpful in your fiercest battles. I used them extensivly in the final huge battle scene, and let me tell you they come in mighty handy. The gunner and kamikaze you can guess what they do (one has, you guessed it, a machine gun, and the other one has dynamite strapped to his back), the lightkiller knocks out lights for you so you can manifest more ‘dark energy’ (you need darkness for it, duh!), and the berserker, well, he just goes ape shit. (I dunno i didnt’ use him very much, my favs where the kamikaze and the gunner.

So to summarize, I would give the game about a 6.5, mostly b/c they did such a good job with the gameplay engine and the new spin on a shooter, but I take away alot of points for the overall slowness of the game b/w combat sections… seriously for the first 2/3rds of the game you will walk around for 20 minutes trying to figure out where the next storyline picks up, then when you get to it you have to kill like one guy, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseum (yawn)…

I am really surprised i held on long enough to play it all the way through, i came close to returning it many a time. I think the only reason i DID play it all the way through was it was the only new game I had my grubby paws on at the time so really didn’t have any options when it came to enjoying new content. So all in all… a 9 on graphics, a 9 on the engine and new spin on shooters, and a 3.5 on the storyline. just a little more combat would have made it so much cooler! (and no those number don’t add up to average 6.5)