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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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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