The Darkness II First Look Preview

There’s a bit near the end of 2007’s The Darkness where protagonist Jackie Estacado breaks into his rival’s lighthouse mansion during a solar eclipse, and deftly exhibits the supernatural nocturnal skills he’s been nurturing the entire game in order to viciously and dramatically dispatch legions of armed henchmen.

The problem? It’s all cutscene.

Starbreeze’s original often leant towards being a straight-up shooter, bisecting its supernatural powers and akimbo gunplay into neat and tidy compartments. The demon arms, two menacing prongs of razor-sharp darkness that burst out of your shoulders and perched themselves at the sides of the screen, were commonly used to extinguish nearby lights rather than spear foes, and even the energy supply powering your jazzy powers felt sorely lacking no matter how many enemy hearts you guzzled to fuel it.

Not anymore. Few things seem more radical to Digital Extremes’ take on The Darkness than the refocused demon arms. One of them is now triggered with the right bumper and aimed by flicking the right analogue stick, and it’s generally encouraged that you use them to slash anything and everything in your vicinity into raw, meaty chunks.

The demon arm on the left, however, is used for grabbing objects – or, in layman’s terms, lefty’s Mr Grabby compared to righty’s Mr Slashy. Just like before you can wave impaled victims around a bit before forcefully discarding them into nearby objects, but now you can also pick up bits of scenery and chuck them as weapons. Who knew that discarded scaffolding poles were great for skewering your enemies to the wall?

At a recent hands-off demonstration of the game, we get to see Jackie settling into his new life as a mafia don – The Darkness II is set two years after the first. Like most of my nights out, it all starts in a restaurant. Well, it starts a little bit before that, with Jackie staked to a cross like he’s some kind of dark-haired anti-Jesus, but before telling you about that situation the game needs to take you back to dinnertime.

Immediately noticeable is the new art style – hand-painted textures and thin black borders give The Darkness II a whiff of a cel-shaded look and a strong comic book vibe. Models are stylised caricatures rather than po-faced grumps, which give the game a more playful vibe than the steely original. Despite the fact most of the game is rooted in the dark, Digital Extremes is also looking to keep things colourful: dark scenes needn’t be black and miserly, basically, and during the demo we see night skies and dank corridors tinged with hues of inky blues and rich purples.

The game is running on Digital Extremes’ proprietary Evolution engine, the same one used to power 2008’s Dark Sector. Here it’s used to add interesting details to otherwise bland scenes, such as streams of lights dotting the streets of Little Italy or a strobing ginger hue illuminating the inside of a crashed railcar.

Back in the restaurant, however, and Jackie is guided through the well-lit dining room before taking a seat across from two salacious ladies. They exchange a few day-to-day pleasantries – “sorry ladies, I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on” – and then one the fine fillies is shot through the head before Jackie even has a chance to look at the starters, with the gaping exit hole so unfathomably wide the bullet itself must have been the size of a tennis ball.

Still, there’s no time for to worry about that, as a hoofing great car crashes through the wall and then – it had to happen sooner or later, though I wouldn’t have said no if Digital Extremes went to the effort of coding a meal ordering mini-game – all hell breaks loose, the bullets start flying, and Jackie gets his leg torn to ribbons as the vehicle collides with the table. The player finally gets his crosshairs at this point, as one of your associates drags you out of danger while you fire a pistol at the steams of goons who’ve poured into the restaurant. At some point Jackie gets thrown a second piece, and the player gets to dabble with the series’ returning akimbo wielding. After a few dramatic explosions you end up outside, bathing in the restorative powers of night time, which causes your gammy leg to heal and your demon arms to finally come out and play.

This is all teaching you the basic conceit of the game, of course. You’re foolish enough to stand in a well-lit area? Have a horrible charred leg and inexorable danger. Skulk in a dark corridor? Enjoy a bevy of super powers, champ.

Jackie can also grab objects and use them as protection, such as car doors, and in the demo he ends one particular killing spree by throwing said door at a mook and gratuitously separating his legs from his torso. Violence is very much the order of the day, hitting its peak later in a shootout where one of the Demon Arms slashes an enemy vertically in half, ending with a clear money shot of the poor guy’s spine as the two parts crumple to the ground.

The action moves from weaving in and out of vintage cars on the streets of Little Italy to the tunnels of the Canal Street subway station, where the Darkling – one of Jackie’s demonic minions – makes an appearance. We see him killing a rival Mafioso and then urinating on his corpse, which is basically business as usual for the little scamp. In the first game the Darklings would be random timed summons, but now you just get the one – and he’s his own character, too, but still bizarrely obsessed with pissing all over the dead. The more things change, it seems.

Everything comes to a stop when Jackie, who at this point is attempting to flee his pursuers by running across the subway tracks, collides with a moving train. He wakes up nailed to the aforementioned cross, and is quickly interrogated by a tiny old man complete with a cane and all the swagger of a pantomime villain. The old guy wants the powers of the Darkness, but giving them up would kind of ruin the point of the game – instead Jackie breaks out, stabs a henchman in the neck and falls to the floor, still much too weak to get up after being hit by a moving train. The sinister old guy, obviously frustrated about how his favourite henchman’s jugular is now spraying the walls red, says he’s going to start picking Jackie’s family off one by one.

With those threats, the figure leaves the room and the demo is over. What’s shown is a tempting teaser of the game – surprisingly colourful, gleefully cartoonish and viciously callous – but with so many high-profile games coming out this autumn I hope The Darkness II gets the exposure early impressions suggest it deserves.

The Darkness II is scheduled for release on 360, PS3 and PC in autumn 2011