The Darkness - Review
(for the Playstation 3)



I talk a lot about a game's level of "polished"ness, as it were. I feel like I should be attributing this to a healthy design cycle: if a game has realistic goals and does accurately what it sets out to do, it can be playtested and refined more before it's release. This makes it even better at what it sets out to do.

The darkness feels like it doesn't lack this polish, but it doesn't exactly have it either. It's such an inbetween experience that it gets stuck in some sort of game limbo. Some parts of the game snap together and just fit so well, and others have such painfully obvious missing pieces that it feels broken; it feels so broken you wonder if they even bothered to take some time to actually play the game to see if it was fun before they released it.

The Darkness is a very competent shooter. Like most modern shooters it comes up with something to set it apart; in this case, it uses two "darkness snakes". I call them snakes as they are long and snakey. I do not believe that is a proper name, and they are just some strands of pure evil that sprout from the main character's shoulders. Either way we just roll with it. You can attack with the snakes, nom down opponent's hearts, and summon creatures to help you in your fight. And it's not like all of this isn't fun, it is. The shooting itself feels tight enough when you actually do come across things to shoot.

So where does it all fall down? Everywhere. When your shadow friends suggest you stay in the shadows to recharge your power, where there is no obvious indication as to where is "dark" and "light" (the whole world is pretty consistently lit) and there's no obvious indication of your power either. When you set out to find a shop where a character you need to meet up with is hiding, and there's no directions, compass or map to tell you which way to go, leaving you to wander in the city for ages until you stumble on your destination. When you're left to guess at the controls your interactions with the environment without any solid tutorial. These should all come naturally... good modern games teach these things in line with the story, or tell you what you need to know before you set out at the very least. They don't leave you to guess at buttons until you get it right.

So despite doing some neat things with the genre, Darkness is somewhat forgettable as it doesn't really innovate in any meaningful way, and everything else it does as a shooter is done the same way in other shooters but better. This game came out in 2007, just down the temporal road from Halo 3 so it never really stood much of a chance at standing out. That said, it was still a fun shooter.

And that voice is still as creepy as all hell.