The Haunted Hoard: The Darkness (PS3)
The Darkness was marketed as a first-person shooter horror game where you are the horror, and while this was likely done in reference to the fearsome monster the game’s main character commands, it feels like it goes much deeper than that. The majority of the game is structured in a way where it could have been a realistic mob shooter in New York City where you’re mostly up against mafia goons and corrupt cops. Once you start to utilize The Darkness within you though, you’re incentivized to plunge places into total shadow and lurk around with slithering tentacles to catch enemies by surprise. While not many of the men you’re up against seem to express their fear, it’s easy to imagine how panicked someone would be to see a man wrapped in shadow approaching no matter how much you shoot at him, the fanged mouths of some beast attached to him feasting on the hearts of your comrades.
Jackie Estacado has every reason to turn The Darkness against his fellow mobsters though. On the day of his 21st birthday, Jackie is set up to get whacked by his adoptive uncle Paulie, the two having butt heads before over Paulie’s shift to the mob dealing in the exploitative industry of drugs. Waiting for this birthday was a poor choice though, as the former mafia hitman just so happens to be manifesting a strange but beneficial curse on this important milestone, a force known as The Darkness now not only invested in keeping him alive, but giving him some powerful tools to ensure it. The Darkness definitely wishes to dominate Jackie and use him as a means to kill as many people as possible, but despite Jackie’s often emotionless delivery, his quest for vengeance and desire to protect those close to him keeps him in control. Working with other more traditional mafiosos, Jackie works his way through Paulie’s men for most of the adventure, the game waiting a fair bit to even start discussing this strange shadowy monster you’re using constantly in combat, but when it does start explaining things, it moves away from the gritty realistic streets of NYC to a nightmare realm where you’re hardly the only horror.
While Jackie’s supernatural powers are the headliners, there is still a focus on traditional firearms. Usually, whether you’re wielding dual pistols, a shotgun, or an automatic, simply firing rapidly in the direction of enemy will be your best approach, and when starting out, the guns definitely feel crucial to continued success since your other powers are rolled out more slowly. When you manifest The Darkness, you tap into a range of additional skills, the most important being a passive shield that becomes all but necessary at points to survive the incoming gunfire. A power called The Creeping Dark allows you to approach fights in a different manner though, the player commanding a single slithering tentacle that can scout out fairly far and kill most men in a single bite. The Creeping Dark can almost be too good in certain situations, especially since it can open doors on its own, allowing it to basically clear out as many rooms as you like with little risk. If it is shot too much or enters too bright an area it will rescind and it definitely can’t be used in more frantic gunfights where you can’t find an easy place to hide, but the effectiveness of this skill does leech some potential difficulty from the game despite being a nice alternative to running in guns blazing.
One way The Darkness tries to limit your use of your supernatural skills is a need to drain darkness, the player having to stay in shadows to fuel their powers. Initially there can be some risk involved, your only means to shutting out many lights being to shoot them out, thus announcing your presence. However, as you have The Darkness consume the hearts of killed enemies, it gains new powers, one of which allows you to easily shatter lights without much risk. Even later down the line you even get the ability to make a small localized black hole that sucks in nearby enemies and almost guarantees kills, and while it uses up a lot of darkness energy and you can’t use it on anyone too far away, it’s not too hard to use it on a group of baddies, fuel up on darkness, and then go to the next room and repeat the process. The game does understand to some degree that again it has given you quite a strong power, and like how it counters the Creeping Dark it starts rolling out more aggressive enemies to prevent its overuse. It still can oversimplify the action at parts, but also having that downtime where The Darkness can’t help you after a black hole means it can’t help in the larger skirmishes where gunmen are on all sides and happy to tear you apart if you lose your shadowy protector even for a few seconds.
The Darkness is primarily a killing tool, but there are a few segments that involve using it for infiltration beyond just Creeping Dark covert kills. One such use is through Darklings, the player able to find small portals they can use to create an imp-like ally. Some like the Berserker are purely attackers, but a Kamikaze Darkling can be used to destroy objects like power stations to open the path forward. On the one hand, few interactions feel like true puzzles, and yet your forward progress in The Darkness can be briefly interrupted as it wants you to figure out something small like which interactive object in the environment you need to bust or even which path you’re meant to take. A lot of your exploration of New York involves people giving you directions, and while you have a map and a pause screen with reminders on where to go, the map doesn’t show every important location and there’s actually a focus on finding connections through things like the subway to get to your destination. The Darkness does lay out a few optional activities so there’s a bit more reason to look around than just getting lost on your way to your objective. Some of these are telephone numbers which are less interesting for the strange characters you briefly listen to and more about the unlockable collectibles you get for calling them, The Darkness even including a few full on comic books such as ones from The Darkness series it’s adapting. The side missions are a bit less interesting, often just leading to a quick firefight that won’t really stand out in a game full of them.
The Darkness does feature an online multiplayer component as well, and it doesn’t just port over Jackie’s powers from the main game. In fact, it approach gunfights quite differently, a lot more focus put on running around small areas, finding item and power pick-ups, and trying to quickly kill players in mostly open areas. The cover of darkness is a big feature in single-player, but multiplayer instead grants you the power to turn into a Darkling and quickly scale up walls or do large leaping attacks, the fast pace feeling better from a shooting game standpoint but also not necessarily carrying over the most unique aspects of the single player. The sections in the story where you head to a strange other world do feel like they do the better job of transporting you into a new play type. There is still a focus on your power use, but the large open spaces there still unfold at a measured pace befitting how your attacks are handled while enemies are also harder to put down permanently. These horror focused segments do properly focus in on the strange ancient evil you’re tapping into since otherwise the story mostly just has it along for the ride to make you capable enough to do some very violent mafia reforms, although the direction the plot ultimately heads in resolving its supernatural side doesn’t feel quite as clean as the straightforward mob revenge narrative.
THE VERDICT: Your monstrous supernatural powers in The Darkness are both a blessing and a curse. Their strength makes them satisfying and outright required at parts, but it can also centralize your approach to many conflicts despite the game starting to try and counter them. Heading to the Otherworld makes for an interesting shift in tone from the occasionally confusing navigation of New York, but mostly The Darkness feels like a shooter where you’re meant to revel in your power kept a bit fresh by the times it suddenly pushes back hard enough to make you break away from the all too effective tactics your abilities otherwise allow.
And so, I give The Darkness for PlayStation 3…
An OKAY rating. The Creeping Dark and Black Hole are both interesting powers and ones that definitely improve The Darkness with their presence, but it also feels like they throw off the game balance a bit too much. Sometimes the game can structure a room well to put up a fight, but you slither in and take the enemies out one by one so you miss that fight, or you just launch a black hole and then hide behind a corner to soak up some more darkness to do it again. The Darklings feel like they could have had more interesting battle applications if you weren’t already so capable, although they also sometimes disobey for unclear reasons or choose odd paths to travel so it might be for the best their influence is minimal or tied mostly to small interactions instead. The shooting does its job at least even if it is often straightforward, but the moments the game starts to put the squeeze on the player don’t feel numerous enough to really keep up the sense of excitement or danger one would hope for from a shooter. It’s a bit too easy to find some darkness to lap up and keep your powers fueled, but the black hole’s limitations at least feel like a step in the right direction. If enemies were better at shooting at the Creeping Dark you wouldn’t be able to use it so easily to clear out rooms ahead, and while some moments do flirt with the idea of weaponized light, it does feel like it could have been better used to deny you repeated use of certain techniques or give enemies more unique advantages than being numerous in wide open spaces. It is at least somewhat understandable The Darkness doesn’t carry over all its mechanics to multiplayer, they would run too rampant there even though Creeping Dark would be much more easily countered by players who can accurately shoot it reliably.
The Darkness does back up its claim that you’re the powerful monster tearing through terrible people, but one thing about the monsters in horror is they’re often unbelievably strong. The Darkness can manage your vulnerability a bit so you’re not just flattening all opposition you face with ease, but the effectiveness of your supernatural powers can sometimes undermine sections and then leave you instead focusing on the sometimes confusing navigation. There is definitely some enjoyment in gradually taking out the lights in an area before tearing apart the enemy gunmen with your fanged tentacles nearly unopposed, but it’s an experience too often repeated and thus The Darkness feels like it’s more about simple thrills than exciting and memorable battles.