The Darkness Review (PS3)

About.com Rating 4 Star Rating

User Rating 4 Star Rating (1 Review) write a review

From Roger Altizer, former About.com Guide

The Darkness PS3 Screenshot

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The Bottom Line

The Darkness is most likely going to be the best game this summer, and I'd say it is one of the top 5 PS3 games out, to date. Be warned, the Darkness is truly for mature audiences. Demon possessed gangsters are not suitable playmates for the kiddos. But for the grownups in your home, the Darkness provides a visceral, frightening, clever game that will suck you in with innovative gameplay and an intriguing story.

Pros

The Darkness is one of the best looking games out there
It would be my pick for best voice acting
Dark, violent, and oddly funny
Intuitive controls and interface let you focus on the game
The Darkness spins a yarn that you will actually want to pay attention to

Cons

As you grow more powerful, the game gets much easier
Multiplayer is nowhere near as strong as the single player game

Description

Graphics: 4.5 With a little more anti-aliasing this would have been a perfect looking game, as it stands it's just great
Sound: 5+ This is some of the best voice acting I have ever heard. Why can't the Spiderman games sound this good?
Control: 4 The aiming seems to be "aided" sometimes, but the controls are easy and give you quick access to everything
Difficulty: 2.5 I started the game on hard, and struggled with the first level, after I got the Darkness it was cake
Gameplay: 4.5 From controlling giant tentacles to ordering around Darklings this game offers fun options in spades
Multiplayer: 2.5 It is obvious that nowhere near as a much attention was placed on the multiplayer, it's a good diversion
Online: 2.4 The online-only multiplayer supports 2-8 players
Documentation: 3 The in game journal keeps you on track but did we learn nothing from Dead Rising... Bigger Text!
Rated: Mature Take this one seriously. Language, drugs, and heaps of gruesome violence.
All scores are out of 5. Final score is not an average of the individual scores.

Guide Review - The Darkness Review (PS3)

Let's get through the obvious. The Darkness is a superb looking game. It supports various HD all the way through 1080p. The art direction is, in word, amazing. The Subways look just like every subway I've ever been on. Every little bit of the environment has been paid attention to, so much so that I had to stop and just look at the wall paper once, "I wonder how that would look in my den?" The area I was most skeptical of became one of my favorite aspects, the tentacles. I could not imagine them looking anywhere near right in a first person shooter. The Darkness proves how limited my imagination really is, the tentacles were creepy and mesmerizing.

As good as it looks (don't listen to the fan-boys argue about frame rates, it looks grand), the real strength of the game is its amazing cinematic properties. In a film I'd say it had an amazing director of photography, in a videogame, it lies less in the hands of one person. Whoever the people were behind the opening sequence of The Darkness deserve an award. It was the best videogame opening I've seen since the Return of the King game.

Riddick was a game with great story and atmosphere, but The Darkness builds it to a whole new level. In fact, I'd argue that this is more of a hybrid game than a first person shooter. With the heavy emphasis on narrative, I'd call it an adventure FPS, and it is a welcome departure from the guns only philosophy of the FPS genre.

The Darkness not only makes you feel like a part of the tale, but it helps you care about it as well with limited free roaming and unlockables which motivate you to stick with the story to the end.

I was a skeptic, but this demon/gangster game has me caught in its jaws. The Darkness looks and plays the way a next-gen game should.

User Reviews

4 out of 5

The Darkness PS3, Member persianpaul

Before you start reading, I WILL NOT be including any cheats, hints or walkthroughs for this game in this review. Anyhow, I first started playing this game roughly about a year ago and its literally that good, i just found it impossible to put the controller down. On some occasions, i even spent 12 hours a day on it! You start out and quickly learn that your main character, Jackie (I can not put any full names in the review) is a contract killer for the Franchetti crime family. Just because he may be a killer, it does not mean he does not have a conscience. He loves his Aunt Sarah (not in a dodgy way) and claims that Jenny is the only reason he bothers to get out of bed in the mornings. By now, you will have more than likely realised this is much more than your average FPS. It is set in a realistic and very detailed sort of world, inhabited by demons - Darklings, which you can suck up through vortexes to use against your enemies. Very handy. You think thats good? Jackie himself is infested with The Darkness - another kind of demon, which is so powerful, it will rip your enemies hearts clean out and chomps on it as a snack! Fed up with being taken for granted, maybe even pushed around at times, Jackie decides that enough is enough and sets out to put those who deserve it six feet under. But of course, it gets a whole lot more complicated. (SPOILER ALERT!!!) Towards the end of the game, even friends of Jackie's ask him to dispose of people who are giving them grief, of course you have the option to decline or put their request in your to do pile, but its always fun to knock them off. ""Another one bites the dust"", ha! (SPOILER ENDS) Generally, i think this is a very good game, good graphics, fantastic storyline and very well detailed. The way it has come down in price makes it even more affordable too. If you can get a well looked after 2nd hand copy, even better. I would urge anybody who is into this sort of thing to just go out and get it. I must remind you though, this is an 18+ for a reason. It contains strong bloody violence and language. Enjoy the game!

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