The Darkness II: Review

Visceral. Intense. Mind-bending. All of these describe The Darkness II. Continuing where the first game left off, TD2 wastes no time in throwing the player directly into the heat of action as Jackie Estacado is forced to unleash the darkness to fend off the attempts on his life and defend his loved ones. Power comes with a price as Jackie is frequently resisting the darkness inside of him while trying to rescue the imprisoned soul of his lost love. The Darkness II takes us on a journey that phases in and out of reality in a way that really makes the player question what is real and what is an illusion.

Story: 5/5

The plot revolves around the protagonist from the previous game after he successfully "buried" the Darkness deep within himself, refusing to give into the temptation to unleash it. Despite his efforts, Jackie and his "family" (in the context of both blood and mafia family) come under siege from the notorious brotherhood, a secret society bent on world domination and destruction through the utilization of the Darkness. Forced to unleash The Darkness, Jackie rails against The Brotherhood as well as the insidious presence of The Darkness within himself. Jackie's motivation is the final destruction of The Darkness and the salvation of the soul of his lost beloved, Jenny, a victim of one of Jackie's enemies from the original game. After he death The Darkness took her soul and imprisoned it within the abyss, revealing this to Jackie in order to motivate him to prevent The Brotherhood from stealing it. Plagued with guilt, Jackie reluctantly protects The Darkness and fights to free Jenny's soul from its sinister grasp.

Throughout this endeavor Jackie wakes up in a mental institution surrounded by counterparts of his family. Some are doctors, nurses, and other patients, all of which tell Jackie that The Darkness is nothing but a voice in his head, that it isn't real. These trips to the psych ward do a fantastic job of generating the feeling that there is a much more rational reason that all of this is happening, it appeals to the player's rational sense of how the world really works. Putting the supernatural elements of the game into a real world context definitely works well as a story mechanic to both confuse the player and develop Jackie's character who is steadily being driven insane.

I AM The Darkness!

The game is quite short and only sports about four hours of solid campaign game-play which also means the story felt a little cut down. *SPOILER ALERT* when you're finally confronted with the choice between the psych ward and the real world you're actually given a choice which I assume dictates which ending you get (good/bad) I chose the "real" world which involves a powerful scene where Jackie must make the choice to abandon the manifestation of Jenny in front of him, begging him to stay. After making this choice Jackie hurls himself off a building as The Darkness screeches in rage at Jackie's ability to constantly defy it. You wake up in the abyss within The Darkness where you fight to free Jenny's soul through hordes of nightmarish ghouls. Upon finally saving Jenny you hold her one last time, the credits roll, and then there is a special cliffhanger ending afterwards that I won't mention here (Youtube it if you'd like to see it) but this ending ties the story up quite nicely and reveals the Angelus, the counterpart to The Darkness, suggesting a potential Darkness III.

Game-play: 4/5

The Darkness II has a pretty standard setup for its gun-play but the developers fully understand that our ADD society could not possible be satisfied with mere dual wielding capabilities. No, they gave us "quad-wielding". This essentially means that you can dual wield guns and fire both of them while grabbing enemies with one tendril and slashing away with the other. This can be used later in the game to seamlessly fend off enemies both near and far. I definitely enjoyed this system despite its chaotic nature, it definitely forced me to really be engaged and mindful of how I was utilizing what was made available to me. Typically on normal difficulty you can play through by simply using one thing at a time but when you make the jump up to harder difficulties it becomes more essential to use all of Jackie's tools. I only took a point off here due to the aforementioned chaotic nature of this system as it can easily overwhelm new players.

I'm going to shoot you, bite you, and cut you. Not necessarily in that order.

Another factor here is the use of the Darkling, a strangely British side-kick who makes a return from the first game. You'll occasionally take the perspective of this little guy to either save Jackie or open doors that Jackie can't access. He's actually a pretty funny character and frequently makes fun of, pokes, prods, and laughs at your fallen enemies. One thing I loved about this little dude is that he'll go off on his own in combat and tug on your opponent's legs or straight up maul them which is a nice bonus when you've got a lot of enemies firing at you. You can also throw the Darkling at your opponents...or at a wall if you just don't want him around for a while. I had a lot of fun with the explosive perk that causes anything you throw to explode on impact...including the Darkling.

Graphics: 4/5

Alright I need to add in a little disclaimer here, the developers of this game ported the story from a graphic novel and along with it, the art style. The artists working on this game literally hand painted a great deal of it to give it a more authentic look and feel of a comic book. At first I didn't like this style and I frequently found that many of the smaller details in the world looked almost like concept art. Over time, however, the style grew on me and I really enjoyed the mood that this art style created and I think it fit quite well with the game's theme.

Replay Value: Medium

The only reason this even gets a "medium" rating is due to the presence of multiple endings made accessible thanks to the game's incredibly short campaign. In addition to the campaign you're given access to "Vendettas", stories that happen concurrently with the main story, where you play as members of Jackie's organization who run errands for him that are mentioned in the main story. These are kind of nice if not just because they serve to flesh out the main plot a bit more with different perspectives. You choose from one of four agents who have various Darkness abilities and unique weapons. For example: the character I chose was Inugami, a man in possession of the kusanagi blade that feeds on the souls of the wicked. Using a katana in place of tendrils was a nice change of pace and provided a different perspective to view the game from.

Katana in one hand, UZI in the other.

As time marches on so do my expectations. With that being said, I expect new games to be current in all their aspects if I'm going to be expected to pay a full 60 dollars for them. When I look at the various aspects of this game I ultimately can't justify buying this for full price. With a meager four hour campaign this game will only keep you busy for a weekend at best and unless you really like the co-op I don't suggest picking this up for full price. I do, however, recommend playing this game if you've got a strong stomach (it's really brutal) and have access to Gamefly or another game rental service where you aren't required to pay full price.

Final Score: 8.5/10

Thanks for reading!

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TERA Online Closed Beta 1 Impressions

So, I get to be a part of all five of Tera online's closed betas as well as their open beta and head start event and that's pretty awesome. I love beta testing MMO's, always have, I love seeing them in their pre-launch phase since it really shows the developer's true colors in regards to how they respond to player input and where their focus is. One thing that never fails to wreck an online community is poor leadership on the developers end. I've seen Aion, one of the more interesting MMO's, fail almost entirely due to a lack of proper and professional management from NC West. I'm hoping En Masse Entertainment is able to prove just how much they care about their players and the virtual community as a whole.

The first closed beta began last Friday and lasted until Sunday, giving us about two and a half days to explore the first areas of the game (Levels 1-22). The whole thing started out a bit rough, due to either En Masse underestimating how many people were in the beta or just a faulty server, and both the open servers took a nose dive after a few minutes. Not a great start but they recovered well and we were happily playing Tera shortly after this crash. The only other thing I'd like to mention here is the queue, oh boy that was a long one...my friend and I waited about an hour to log in, probably why the server crashed, tons of people were part of this test. En Masse quickly sorted everything out and I wasn't stuck in another queue the entire beta, yay for them, it took SWTOR half a month to rid us of long queues.

The Gameplay: What do I need to say about this? Oh yeah, its awesome. I love Tera's gameplay, it gives the player such a high degree of control over their character's movement and combat unlike any MMO I've played before. With the lack of a targeting system Tera forces players to constantly think about their positioning in relation to their targets and making their strikes accurate. This is not the game for people who like to sit around and press 111 222 111 333 5 and expect to win a fight. No, the combat is extremely demanding on the player and your success in combat is ultimately dependent on your ability to be strategic with your fights. This goes double for the Warrior class, which I ended up choosing to play for this test.

The Warrior Class: Widely regarded as one of, if not THE hardest class to play. It is the only class you can select with a 5-star difficulty rating (Yes, En Masse categorized their classes based on difficulty). I'm typically a guy who plays the rogue/assassin type character and I was sorely disappointed by Tera's lack of "rogues" until I realized that the Warrior might as well just be called an assassin. They utilize two swords, focus on evasion, backstabbing, high attack speed, and poisons. Yeah, they're pretty much Tera's assassins minus the focus on daggers (Sadface). My experience with the warrior was a good one, I enjoyed the fast paced combat simply because it keeps me engaged and even when I'm grinding stuff for Guild Quests I still enjoy fighting against the AI.

PvP as a Warrior: Yikes, this was a bit rough at this stage in the game, I was finding myself having trouble dealing with many of the other classes at 22. I know PvP isn't balanced around low levels and you'll typically find more balance at endgame but it was just damaging to the ego when I can't come close to dropping a Slayer despite having similar gear/level. I had the opportunity to fight several slayers (the dudes are everywhere), a few Berserkers (went better than slayers), and some Mystics (Did not go so well). The PvP is fun but I do foresee some balancing issues if not just from observing the reactions and class populations from the Korean/Japanese servers. Slayers essentially dominate most other classes in 1v1 PvP which is somewhat frustrating since most games struggle with balancing their heavy DPS classes for PvP. Aion's Templars and Gladiators were some of the easier classes to play and were near impossible to beat as another melee class unless you were another Glad/Temp. Hopefully the feedback from KR/JP servers will be enough to get some balance for future PvP.

BAM's: "Big Ass Monsters", the "Elites" of Tera Online. These guys are tough at first but the game is based on player skill so much so that you can solo these titans without much issue, aside from how long it takes. People constantly post videos of them soloing these and trying to look awesome. Well, it does kinda look awesome to see a little dude fighting a behemoth all by himself, nimbly dodging through waves of attacks and shelling out damage all the while. Killing a BAM is a lot of fun and typically very rewarding, the drop a lot of loot and crafting materials.

Boss Experience: My friend Shiggy (Slayer) and I (Warrior) decided to take on a field boss to see just how far we could get with two people against a large boss. The result was: We killed it, but it wasn't easy. The particular boss we chose was level 25, three levels above the first beta cap for us, so right away we were put at a level disadvantage. The fight started easily enough, I tanked him while Shiggy put DPS on and tried to stay behind him. This worked until about 70% when the boss started glowing and lighting began to cover over its arms. His attack speed went through the roof and he began a near non-stop barrage of powered up attacks directed at me. Eventually there was one I just couldn't avoid, I figured it was fine to get hit once...I was wrong and died immediately, crushed under this thing's titanic ass. Shiggy took aggro and kited him around while I res'd up and headed back (It was near a teleporter thankfully) and by the time I had gotten back the previously powered up boss was back to normal so we kept bringing him down slowly but surely. Every five or ten minutes the boss would "enrage" again and we were forced to kite him around until it ran out. This became difficult because he started launching projectiles at us if we got too far away...eventually we did kill him without wiping but it was an incredibly lengthy battle and really kept us on our toes. We got some good loot from him including a whopping seven uncommon boss runes which I can use for crafting in the next patch. (Typical BAMs of that level don't drop anywhere near that many). Bosses can be incredibly tough but are quite fun and rewarding.

Instances: I only did one instance that was called "Secret Base". It was a pretty fun experience, lots of elite mobs to fight through and two dynamic boss battles. The bosses are the cool part of these instances, they feel more fluid than typical bosses on MMOs, the ones we fought rarely stood still long enough to let us get in many hits. The bosses don't just sit there and let you hit them, the move around, use long range attacks, I almost felt as if the boss was kiting the players around, how backwards is that? The video of our first encounter with the boss of Secret Base can be seen here.

Overall: Tera left a good impression on me after the first test, I really feel like En Masse is invested in giving us a good gaming experience and providing consistent, innovative content for us in the future. Tera's gameplay definitely makes it stand out from typical MMOs that we've seen in the past. I'm extremely excited for the second closed test beginning on the 24th of February. Thanks for reading! If you'd like to contact me in-game I'll be on Serpentis Isle (I think?) under the name "Cross".

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A First Look: The Darkness II

If you read my Facebook advertisement for this post you'll know that my views are in no way favorable towards this game. It is essentially more of what the first game provided us and strikes me as a bit of a half-hearted effort at a sequel. The actual plot of the game revolves around a guy who is clearly a zombie pirate (see picture) and his attempts to steal your powers from you. Now, that plot is derived from my experience with the demo and chances are it isn't the "real" plot but hey, you aren't playing this game for the plot I wager, it's for the sadistic combat and gratuitous swearing! Well they carried over said gore and swearing in full force so no worries if that's why you'd like to play this installment of The Darkness series.

Arrrrr! Brains!

Sadly, I am no longer 12 years old and I remain unimpressed by the number of times they can scream obscenities as it has no bearing on the actual game or plot development, it is however characteristic of a kind of immature game that seeks to generate creative swearing in place of actual dialogue. Yeah, I'm annoyed at the lack of depth a bit which makes me somewhat biased towards the game as a whole but I'll try to remain objective about the rest of the aspects of The Darkness II.

Next we've got the combat mechanics. Well they're visceral and the finishers look pretty cool since you can essentially just have one of your evil snake things vivisection people or just slap their heads clean off, yay for gore? The environment lends itself well to this game and provides you with a multitude of things to shield yourself with (car doors) that can also be re-purposed as projectiles should you need them. The combat is fast paced with a lot of variety, for example: You can use one of your tendrils to perform melee attacks while the other is used to grab stunned enemies (this can be combo'd) all the while you can still be shooting a firearm or two. The joys of having four arms. One thing I have to point out that still proves to be a constant annoyance is the light. SCREW THE LIGHTS. Stopping every two steps to break the light fixtures dangling judgmentally above my head is terribly annoying and breaks the flow of combat occasionally. If I spun that to look positive I'd say it forces me to pay extra attention to my surroundings, but screw that, it's annoying. Overall the combat receives a passing mark from me, I enjoyed the variety it provided and I expect the full game to do even more due to the implementation of what I'll touch on next.

Skill trees! Alright I couldn't remember if the original Darkness game had skill trees, not for the life of me, it has been far too long since I played through it. Either way, is this a good mechanic for this type of game? Or will it serve only to bog down gameplay with ultimately meaningless "perks"? Time will tell. It could prove to be interesting if each tree drastically alters how the combat works for you. I'll need to take a more in-depth look at all the potential skills you can learn to get a better impression of how they'll pan out in actual combat. The only perks I got were: the ability to rip the hearts out of fallen enemies and eat them, and imbuing my revolvers with dark energy to temporarily buff up their damage.

One last gripe and then I'm done. The graphics. At least the blood graphics. I mean it looks all cool when I'm being crucified and stuff but then I fall on the floor and look down through the hole in my hand as the blood "pools" under it. By pools I mean there is a generic blood splatter image that just pops out roughly under where the hole should be. I hope it gets tweaked a little but my expectations are rising in terms of quality in all areas of the game. Plus, I know they have some talented artists on staff, my desktop background is easily one of the coolest pieces I have seen done to advertise a game. Either way, the graphics are a minor gripe and my problem still lies in the overload of crappy dialogue and questionable amounts of blood that make me feel like they're trying to sell me gore rather than an actual game. I'll probably be passing this game off to a less biased member of TI for a full review when it launches tomorrow.

Thanks for reading! Expect a full review of the game sometime in the next week or so.

-Fest

Aforementioned awesome artwork.

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A First Look: Asura's Wrath

Keeping with the trend of taking a peek at the upcoming 2012 titles I decided to download a couple demos, which happened to include a game I've been pretty excited for since seeing the reveal trailer some time ago, Asura's Wrath.

Not kidding.

This is not your run of the mill game, like not even close, I mean really, REALLY out in left field. Why is that? Oh I don't know...but the demo involves me punching a giant fat guy to death. By giant I of course mean roughly twice the size of Earth.

I have to give the developers credit for their astoundingly creative ideas. I mean I have certainly had enough of fighting people the same size as me, what fun is that? I am clearly too awesome to demean myself with fighting people sized baddies. Now I expect every game I play in the future to include one boss that is the size of the planet. Step it up people.

(sort of sarcastic....maybe?)

Urf.

The demo consists of two parts, first one was the planet sized baddie as pictured above, which sorta blew my mind, the next was a fight with some regular sized guy who looks like Asura. My trip from fighting a planet sized behemoth is over! Time to have a normal boss fight! Wrong. It's time to go to the moon and have an epic battle with a dude with a sword! He kind of kicks your ass most of the time but at least it looks cool when he makes his sword extend, impales you, and then rams you back down to Earth. Then, as if ramming you through the atmosphere wasn't badass enough for this guy, he impales the entire planet for good measure. I felt like I was watching an episode of Dragon Ball Z where everyone turned red instead of yellow. Awesome.

Enough about the over the top stuff, lets talk about the gameplay. Unfortunately the demo did not feature much average combat and instead decided to show us two boss fights. From what I can gather from other videos; the one vs. many combat plays like a hack n' slash ramped up to epic proportions with a lot of, for lack of a better term, quick-time events. I know QTEs bring up some bitter emotions for people but these are at least a little better if not just because they involve you doing extremely over the top finishers on bosses or blowing up hordes of lil' baddies. The actions they have you do on the controller also correspond to Asura's movements in the game which is a nice touch that makes it feel less arbitrary. For example, when preparing to intercept the poke-o-doom from the big fat guy, the game has you plant Asura's feet by flicking each analogue stick to the side. At least it isn't the infamous "press x to not die" type of QTE.

A lot of the game is cinematic, for sure, but that doesn't mean you can just sit back and watch. Even the cutscenes that aren't combat related give you the option to "Shut _____ up" which causing the dialogue to skip due to Asura launching himself at his opponent. This provides a bit of a new dimension for how you'll experience the game and just how much crap you want to put up with from your condescending opponents. The Wyzen fight (big fat guy) gives you very little control over Asura's movement, aside from strafing left and right while dashing towards Wyzen. Will this lack of control serve to bolster the gameplay or hinder it? Time will tell, it's hard to give my honest opinion right now since I really did enjoy what they showed me but I could also see it getting kind of old if that's what every fight is. We shall see how things pan out.

I know I've used the phrase "over the top" a couple times in this particular write-up but you know, that's exactly what this game is. Every aspect of it has taken the step up to absolutely, impossibly, amazingly, epic. It destroys what we thought was epic before and replaces it with mind-blowing, planet-impaling goodness. I am excited to see how else Asura's Wrath shocks me when it releases on the 21st of February, be sure to check it out! Thanks for reading.

-Fest

P.S.

Come at me bro.

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A First Look: Resident Evil: Revelations (3DS)

Hey Team Infestation Fans, the name's Stack and I'm back after a long hiatus from writing things as it made my brain hurt....Well besides that, I am happy to be able to give you my opinions regarding a game I have been looking forward to for some time now.

Being an avid Resident Evil fan since the first one came out back in 1996, jolting out of my seat everytime I saw a zombie and running for my mother (Yeah, I was pretty young). Anyway, this year is a huge one for the RE franchise with games and movies coming out like crazy. So, as any devoted fan would, I jacked my friend's 3DS and gave the new Resident Evil Revelations Demo a go.

Now I know Resident Evil games haven't been fantasic for handheld platforms in the past so many people were hoping for something a little more polished in the future. For example: Resident Evil: Deadly Silence,with its awful camera angles and sub-par script left a lot to be desired, especially for a series with such a good track record as the Resident Evil series. So even I was a bit skeptical about Revelations. But, somewhat to my surprise, as soon as I turned on the demo the opening conversations drew me in and the nostalgia swept over me. The first thing that people will notice about Resident Evil: Revelations are its amazing graphics. This handheld sports visuals comparable, and possibly even better than, Resident Evil 5. The game opens with a classic Resident Evil character, Jill Valentine, who wakes up unable to remember how she got there, with that familiar eerie tone that made me think of a certain mansion. I couldn't believe how I felt walking through the first room feeling like danger could leap out from anywhere, anytime. After finding my way into further rooms, discovering how the smaller puzzles and new gadgets worked I ran into the first, shall I say "monster." A loud noise from the previous room had me creeping towards the hall, nervously. I didn't know what to expect. Now, I am no veteran of handheld gaming as I don't do much on them, so I was pretty sketchy with the controls. But as this creature started lumbered towards me I learned pretty darn quick with what precious ammo I had. I aimed and fired, taking me into first person for the shooting. This was an amazing improvement to the game as opposed to always shooting from an over the shoulder style or with a weird camera angle that has always bugged me, as well as many other gamers. The 3DS' capabilities enhanced this intense scene and made it seem that this monster was even closer or, dare I say, coming right at me. Needless to say, the old nervous feelings causing me to soil myself came creeping back, as the lumbering monstrosity made its way toward me. More and more of these terrors came out of the woodwork then I foolishly ran out of ammo (due to my lack of skillz). Knifing was still an awful idea since being anywhere close to a zombie means its an open buffet at Jill's neck. After getting munched on until all the blood seemed to be drained from Jill's body, for some reason felt kinda responsible, she dropped to the floor as dead as dead can be.

As I stared at the Game Over screen I found myself wanting more. "I WANT! ME NEED!" kept flashing in my mind. If this was only a taste of what the game has in store, my mind is blown. I'm so excited for what is to come in this game, bridging the gap between the events of Resident Evil 4 and 5. I completely recommend this game to anyone who loves the original series as it plays on those nostalgic heartstrings that RE fans all seem to have.

Look for the official US release on February 7th!

Thanks for reading!

-Stack

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