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As the next game after the sleeper hit The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, big things were expected of Starbreeze's The Darkness. Based on the Top Cow comic book, The Darkness was generally well-received, but didn't quite live up to the promise of Riddick, or the comic's perfect video game premise (a mobster with supernatural powers while in the dark). But the game did well enough for a sequel, which arrives today courtesy of developer Digital Extremes. Did the years and the switch in development teams do the trick and establish The Darkness as the next great video game franchise? Find out below.
The Darkness II does what a good sequel should in that it builds on the best of the original while doping away with much of what didn't work. One of the perceived shortcomings of the original game is that it didn't live up to its premise of a bad guy with supernatural tentacles springing from his back. As young Mafioso Jackie Estacado, the first game had players using the Darkness tentacles largely to move objects and smash lights. In The Darkness II, the tentacles play a much larger and more robust role in combat. The game's signature gameplay element is "quad wielding," in which you use both arms and the pair of tentacles springing from you back to dole out pain. The right tentacle slashes, the left can grab objects and throw them. Jackie's hands are thus free to wield one or two guns at a time, maximizing the amount of chaos you can cause.
And cause chaos you will. The more elaborate a kill, the more points you earn towards improving your skills. Shooting an enemy may earn you 10 points, while throwing a pipe to impale them earns you 20. The biggest points comes from executions - you life a stunned enemy with the left tentacle and choose one of four execution styles with a tap of a face button. Not only do these earn you 30 points, they also reward you with health, ammo, a shield or a power recharge. Health is also earned by eating the hearts out of dead bodies, so as you can imagine, The Darkness II is rather violent and unhinged game.
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That is, of course, the intention. At its best, The Darkness II makes you feel like an unstoppable killing machine. In the course of a few seconds, you can knock an enemy into the air, shoot him with dual machine guns, grab a fan blade and slice a guy in half with it from across the map and pull the heart out of a nearby corpse before the first body hits the ground. When those moments happen, they're glorious. Unfortunately, gameplay isn't always that smooth. With so many buttons to manage, things frequently feel a bit clunky, and Jackie isn't exactly the quickest character around. You will die a few times because of fumbles with the controller. Fortunately, you'll never get too frustrated with these moments, and at least the death and resurrection of Jackie makes sense in the contact of the story.
As the Darkness Host, Jackie can't die - The Darkness brings him back to life each time he fails. Naturally, such an awesome power draws attention, and an evil cult is after Jackie to steal his power away. But that's not truly what The Darkness II is about. Despite its ultra-graphic nature and unrelenting violence, this is a love story.
The Darkness II picks up where the first game left off in terms of plot, which I won't detail to avoid spoiling either game. What I will say is that both games are about Jackie and his relationship with Jenny, the love of his life. Jackie and Jenny are both well-rounded characters, more believable and relatable than most video game characters. That's no mean feat, considering that one is a super-powered mob boss and the other is... well, you'll see.
The rest of the characters may not be as fleshed out, but they still have distinct and colorful personalities. For a game almost entirely populated with criminals, I found the cast to be almost universally likable. The Darkness II deserves much praise for its writing - not only are the characters well-developed, the plot is one of the strongest I've encountered in a game in a long while. It may not be one of the all-time greats in terms of storytelling, but it's coherent, generally easy to follow and filled with genuinely gripping moments. Considering that basic logic is too much to ask for many games, The Darkness II seems leagues ahead of the average game.
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Much of the strength of the story is derived from interstitial scenes between the action. The game is punctuated with quiet moments between action scenes, taking place at either Jackie's lavish mansion or an asylum that may or may not be in Jackie's head. In the early part of the game, these quiet scenes set an excellent pace - you're pulled out of the violent gameplay into these scenes while you still want more, leaving you hungry to get back to the action. The pace obviously quickens as it nears its end, and to its detriment. While I never exactly got bored with the core gameplay, it does lose some of its giddy thrill.
Digital Extremes did what it could to keep things fresh over the course of the shortish campaign. There are a couple of scenes in which you play as the Darkling, an evil (and again strangely likable) little imp that accompanies Jackie throughout much of the game. There's a steady progression of skills as you unlock new abilities, of which there are many. There are a couple points where you make choices that affect how the game unfolds. Despite these little seasonings, the core game stays largely the same from beginning to end. It's a good core, but if could have used a little more variety to be great.
You can't, however, fault The Darkness II for being short on content. A last-minute choice leads to branching endings, giving you reason to revist the late stages. There's a New Game+ feature that allows you to revisit the campaign with all your unlocked powers, and a cooperative online mode called Vendettas that's practically a second game. As one of four trained killers, each with their own limited Darkness power, you can progress through a secondary campaign that ties into the main story or tackle a "hit list" of standalone missions to take out some of Jackie's mafia rivals. These four-player online missions also feature upgradable Darkness skills, giving you reason to assemble a group and invest some serious time into finishing them all. I was pleased to see Digital Extremes opt for this mode rather than the tacked-on multiplayer of the original game. It fits cohesively with the single-player mode and offers a surprising amount of content. I've admittedly played less of this mode than I'd like so far, but I'll definitely be investing more time.
The Darkness II is a solid game. It doesn't quite hit the level of greatness, but it's definitely one of the first noteworthy games of 2012. The core gameplay is solid, the story is engaging, and the multiplayer and additional content is fresh. The Darkness II is an unqualified improvement on the original game. It ends with an obvious setup for The Darkness III, and if Digital Extremes can make as much of a leap between this game and that, then that sequel will be one to watch out for indeed.
The Official Verdict: 4 out of 5
This review is based on an Xbox 360 copy of the game provided by the publisher.
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