The Bottom Line
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)
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.
