The Darkness First Look Preview

Hope, I feel, is an essential skill for the average videogame enthusiast. We see a reasonably promising game with a reasonably promising license announced and we promptly start hoping that it’s going to be good. All throughout its development, at the release of every new screenshot and every new little snippet of news, we bolster our conviction that it won’t turn out to be a horrible mess. We read similarly hopeful, publisher-pleasing previews that fire enticing words like ‘potential’ and ‘promise’ at us, and we eagerly await the positive reviews. Then Matrix: Path of Neo (or other equally hyped game) actually comes out and promptly ruins all our positivity with its unashamed terribleness. And yet, we’re never completely crushed, because deep down, we knew it would be disappointing right from the start; we knew that, as always happens, the license would probably be squandered on some third-rate middleware-powered cash-in.

And in such cases, it’s always worst for the fans: the comic-book fans who pick up Ultimate Spiderman or the film fans who hope that, just maybe, X-Men: The Official Game won’t be so bad as everyone says it’s going to be. The Darkness is an extremely well-loved comic-book property whose fans are widespread and generally well informed about videogames, and so when Take-Two announced that it had acquired the license to make a game out of it, I won’t deny that I was more than a little wary of looking forward to it. As always, though, I succumbed; I started to hope that it wouldn’t be just another awful comic-licensed game, that the developer would take full advantage of the awesome setting and powerful hero of the comic books and create something both faithful and enjoyable, knowing deep down in my heart of hearts that it probably wouldn’t turn out that way. As time has gone on, though, The Darkness has looked more and more inviting, not less and less as is usually the case. Having now seen three full levels of the game in addition to all the demo content, I am now convinced – dare I say it – that The Darkness is going to turn out to be something really special. Finally, we may have a game that really takes advantage of its license and can join Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay up on the lonely plateau of ‘Licensed Games That Don’t Suck Really, Really Badly And Are In Fact Actually Quite Good’ (this is, after all, from the same development team). The Darkness is tense, it’s dramatic, it’s a bit scary, it’s powerful and it is gloriously, gratuitously gory. In short, it’s exactly what you’d want from a modern FPS.

That’s not to say that Take-Two has stuck religiously to the comic-book canon for fear of upsetting the fans. A few changes to the hero’s powers make for an altogether more playable experience and often give you the choice between fairly conventional and all-out-violence based approaches. The game begins, with one of the most impressive opening sequences of recent years, on (anti)hero Jackie’s 21st birthday. Driving home after a night out with two friends and fellow mobsters, the player wakes up in the back seat of a car as Jackie’s two friends argue about their next mark. Soon, though, their conversation is interrupted by a police siren and the game slides smoothly from calm into absolute chaos as the driver drives the wrong way down a traffic tunnel in an effort to evade the cops, shooting through windshields and swerving to avoid trucks in the narrow passageway. The carnage soon mounts up – I don’t want to spoil this most superb of opening sequences, suffice to say that it all gets very gratuitous – until Jackie finds himself escaping the scene with dual handguns, with both the police and his traitorous former mafia comrades after his blood. It is at this point that Jackie gets possessed by the Darkness of the game’s title, a destructive demon whose powers allow Jackie to summon demonic darklings (of which there are several different, evil, weirdly lifelike types) or sprout a giant arm from his body that tears through his adversaries with brutal force, along with a wealth of other destructive powers whose energy is drawn from the dark (although consuming dead enemies is also a source of power) – you’ll be shooting out light bulbs not to conceal yourself, but to gain power from the dark.

Though it would be fair to say that the game revolves around the Darkness powers from this point on, the game keeps the FPS staples of tension and spectacle at the forefront. The interface is, at present, beautifully clear, with nary a health bar to be seen. Take-Two is all too aware that The Darkness’ players will have played FPS games before, and so it doesn’t patronise with obvious ‘press X to open the door’ messages unless the game thinks you’re stuck. You’ll glean information entirely from your surroundings, not from on-screen messages – television screens will quickly become your main way of assessing what’s happening around you, although they’ll just as often be showing a cartoon or irrelevant movie. With The Darkness, you never quite know what’s going to happen next – it delights in giving you horrible shocks just when you least expect it, which balances out the sense of power that inevitably comes from using the Darkness powers against enemies.

There are some fantastic animation touches, too, which complement the game’s generally excellent appearance and gives the game’s protagonist a Riddick-like sense of presence; Jackie aims his guns around walls and reacts to his environment like a person, not an FPS automaton. You’ll stop at walls, not just keep walking into them so long as the analogue stick is tilted in the same direction. As he gets closer to enemies, he’ll reach out to grab them and shoot them in the face instead of just shooting stiffly in whichever direction the reticule is pointed (actually, the reticule in The Darkness practically invisible).

The Darkness strikes a good balance of power and tension, and like Riddick before it, it’s cinematic without seeming like it would rather be a move than a game. The Darkness has practically no cutscenes and goes to great pains to immerse the player in its own dark, violent world. We’ve only seen human enemies so far, helpless mortals who were easily swallowed up by the impressive Darkness powers, but as the game goes on more and more supernatural enemies will arrive to challenge you (fans of the comic will no doubt recognise them). All in all, The Darkness is looking simply excellent – not just good-for-a-licensed-game, but actually excellent. And that’s something that we here at Pro-G don’t say very often.