Dark Times Ahead
The Darkness is everything we hoped it would be. And more.
Published: July 17, 2007
By and large, though, the game chugs along with just enough steam that you don't feel things have stagnated, yet you still have time to track down the myriad goodies that Starbreeze threw in. Track down phone numbers and you can hear pre-recorded voicemail messages or one-way conversations from the developers and other crazy characters -- a few of which I thought I remembered from the comics, but I honestly don't know for sure. In addition, you'll get plenty of side jobs to do to keep people happy (and you from just charging through the game), that help thicken up the world a little more.
If you're the collecting type, the game actually sports "Accomplishments," the PS3 version of the 360's Achievements for your gamerscore on Xbox Live, and there's rumors that the Accomplishments will feed right into the Home trophy room. Regardless, there's plenty of extra stuff to do and see.
Oooh, right about seeing stuff: The Darkness may well be one of the most visually amazing games released for the PS3. It isn't so much because of the texture detail or framerate (both are decent, but not absolutely stunning, even/especially in 1080p, which the game natively supports), but because of the time and attention to detail in the characters and the world they inhabit. Starbreeze used something called "VoCap," which is just a fancy buzzword way of saying they recorded the voice acting and physical performances at the same time. This helps give the characters proper body language, but I suspect that the motion capture data wasn't especially dense, because there's still some jitteriness and the hands and mouths in the game move quite a bit more rigidly than most normal people.
But oh what fun it is to hear them talk. I mentioned it before, but the voice acting in The Darkeness from bums on the street to screaming mobsters to Faith No More lead singer Mike Patton and Kirk Acevedo from Oz and The Black Donnellys as The Darkness and Jackie, respectively. Every single vocal performance in the game is at least as good as the best stuff in most other games, and again, because of the script and the inflection used during certain expletives, none of it comes off as forced.
Though the effects in the game are certainly great in their own right, and I'm not taking anything away from 'em (the sounds of the Darkness heads fighting over a heart are amazing, and having all the treble drop out as you near death is a nice touch), the music deserves some serious attention. Gustaf Grefberg's score is so amazingly good at pulling mixed emotions through simple use of instruments. Yeah, there's a lot of angry, crunchy, guitar heavy stuff mixed with choir refrains that play when you're fighting someone, but it's the stuff in between the firefights that really got me. At times I was scared, and others I felt comforted, but it was never one emotion. When I was scared, I felt a little amped up to fight because I knew just how powerful I was, and when I finally made it back to the subway station to hear the long, almost pained strings that wafted through those tiled tunnels, I felt safe, but there was something melancholy about the score, and it became even heavier as the story went on.
The Darkness isn't perfect; the online portion feels so tacked on I really only feel like spending a few sentences talking about it. Matchmaking is a joke, because the game requires such a huge upstream and because most people are idiots when it comes to knowing what kind of connection they have, there can be some pretty horrible lag, but at least the option to play as a character that can morph from heavily armed human to Darkling and gain incredible speed but almost one-hit kill vulnerability is interesting, even if the level designs aren't.
However, for every one area where the game falters, there are at least 10 more immediately there to support it. The visuals are great, the sound is great, the story is great, the gunplay is great, the visceral close-quarters kills are great, the powers are great... Once again, Starbreeze has taken the basic idea of a first-person shooter and used the medium as a fantastic storytelling device. Comic fans, you no longer have to settle for a sub-par translation of the work; The Darkness not only respects but beautifully executes a huge arc of Jackie's growth as a person, and both comic nerd and gamer alike will find plenty to love here.
