The Darkness is an intense and story driven gaming experience aimed squarely at adults.
The Darkness is based off a comic book created by Marc Silvestri, Garth Ennis and David Wohl in the late '90s. As was popular for the time, The Darkness is more of an anti-hero than he is anything else. The comic follows the story of a Mafia hitman named Jackie Estacado. On his twenty-first birthday his uncle Paulie, the head of the crime families in New York, puts out a hit on Jackie fearing that his nephew is seeking to take control of the Mafia for himself. The only thing that saves him from a young death is the emergence of an ancient evil force from within himself, The Darkness. This malevolent entity is the only thing that can help Jackie take revenge on his uncle Paulie and his cronies, but what is are its true motives?
Even though this is a combat heavy game there are only about six guns to be found and used. However, other than the pistols, most are of dubious use. Most of your fights will occur at a fair distance, which means that using either of the two shotguns that you find are a waste. The two rifles that you get are both pretty solid weapons but there is little in the ways of ammo for them for most of the game so there is little reason to use them either.
Jackie is fond of wielding single handed weapons in pairs, so the last two weapons you can use are a pair of pistols and a pair of sub-machine guns. The sub-machine guns are fine guns except for the fact that they go through ammo so fast that you can't rely on them for too long. This leaves you with the trusty pistols. Whereas in most games even a pair of dual-wielded pistols are back up weapons they will be your best friends in this game. They are accurate at long range, do a fair amount of damage and they can kill an enemy via headshot super fast. Plus there is plentiful ammo for them meaning they can be used to take out light sources, I will explain that in a moment. The last advantage to using the pistols, and the sub-machine gun, is due to the way that Jackie fires them. Rather than wasting his time reloading Jackie will drop an empty gun and draw another one to replace it. This means that as you fire guns Jackie will drop one and draw another to replace it. This lets you keep up a sustained amount of fire unparalleled by even the automatic rifle due to the rifle needing to be reloaded.
Setting this game apart from other FPS games is the namesake entity, The Darkness. Once this creature rears its head, it changes how you play this game. Normally the way you tell how damaged you are is the screen turning red and sound being muted as Jackie gets hurt. This goes away with and is as close as you get to knowing your health. But when The Darkness is activated two demonic snake-like heads will be on your screen, one on each side. You can tell how much power you have by the lights that are on the heads. These lights also change color depending on what power you have activated.
When you have the Darkness activated it protects you from harm, absorbing some of the damage you take and letting you see in the dark. It also lets you see portals that can be used to summon Darklings. These mischievous but malevolent little guys come in four different types, all having different uses. They aren't the smartest NPCs and will get hung up on walls often but they can be good for distracting enemies and inflicting damage on larger groups of enemies. In some situations they will also be needed to solve a puzzle.
Much like Chronicles of Riddick, your place is in the shadows but the reason for it is different. Whereas in the last game you needed the shadows to keep you hidden so you could stealth kill enemies in this game the shadows are your life. Light will weaken the Darkness, taking your energy and hurting the Darklings. Only in shadows can you recover the energy used to power your abilities, so taking out lights is of the utmost importance.
There are four powers that the Darkness allows you to use: Creeping Dark, Demon Arm, Darkness Guns and Black Hole. Creeping Dark allows you to send one of the two demon heads off to sneak through ventilation shafts, over walls and to generally open the path for Jackie. Demon Arm allows you to knock out lights, move objects in your path and to impale enemies for a one shot kill. The Darkness Guns can be used in the place of your normal weapons, emulating a sub-machine gun and shotgun but powered by your Darkness energy. Black Hole does what you would imagine, making a whirling vortex that sucks in all enemies and objects in the area, making the game after you get it way easy. All of these powers are incredibly useful although the Darkness Guns are a bit dubious in their usefulness. The Demon Arm is probably the most fun, allowing you to fling cars at enemies with a little practice or carry one as a mobile shield.
This is one of the most graphically intense games so far on the PS3. All of the character models look fabulous, their clothing moves great and the environments are all incredibly well detailed. Lastly, the weapons all look and sound great but they don't even compare to how awesome the Darkness's abilities work. From tearing out an enemies heart to make The Darkness stronger to sucking enemies into a Black Hole and watching them rag-doll about, all these powers look incredible. The only complaint that I had with it is that the character faces show little emotion and their mouths barely move most of the time. But this is a minor complaint considering the regular quality of the game.
Audio in this game is totally top-notch. Not only do the ambient sounds really capture the feel of living in New York but all the weapons sound great. On top of that, all the voice acting is incredibly well done which is saying something especially since the entire game is voice acted. What really makes the audio in this game so awesome is The Darkness and the Darklings. The Darkness sounds incredibly creepy and suitably demonic even when it is trying to be seductive with its offers of power while the Darklings themselves sound like the little lunatics you would expect even as they pee on one of your dead enemies.
Do take note that the game is a bit short, totaling only nine hours on my first playthrough, there is something of a mediocre multiplayer mode. This feels more like an add-on for those who complained that Chronicles of Riddick was missing this than it does a well thought out game mode. While I am grateful they put this in its quite obvious that this game was designed with the single-player experience in mind. Do take note that this game has a very open ending, doing its best to leave room for a sequel. For those people who don't mind getting some story into their FPS games then this is a must own.