No amount of blood or nudity can change the fact that The Darkness 2 is little more than a mediocre shooter.
Graphically, The Darkness 2 is slightly above average. The game incorporates an odd mixture of standard rendering and cel-shading that generally works pretty well, though it can and does often lead to characters sporting disturbingly realistic faces attached to cartoonish bodies. Additionally, as with many cel-shaded games, textures look great up close but tend to go grainy at any sort of distance. On the other hand, the game's all-important gore effects manage to look consistently gruesome (so that's what a dissected human looks like!), the skyboxes look great, and the environments are suitably gritty. There are a few hiccups here and there like some noticeable frame drops during heavy combat and an absolutely atrocious lighting system that actually interferes with gameplay thanks to an irritating mechanic that I'll cover later, but for the most part the game looks mostly decent most of the time.
The game's graphics may be a bit hit or miss, but The Darkness 2's sound design may be its strongest point. The work that Digital Extremes put into making everything sound just right comes through loud and clear. While the writing may occasionally be a little shaky, the game's voice acting is absolutely top-notch. It's been quite a while since I've heard a game voiced this well, and The Darkness 2 deserves recognition for that. Weapons also sound meaty and powerful, and slicing enemies in half with a demonic tentacle sounds much like I'd… erm, like I'd expect it to I guess. The rest of the sound effects also come across strong and the end result is an aural experience that can hold its own with the best in the genre. I only wish the rest of the game could keep pace.
The Darkness 2 opens a couple of years after the events of the first game. If you skipped that title like I did, you'll be pleased to know that there is a brief but relatively informative video available that will get you up to date with the world and its inhabitants in a hurry. There are a lot of rough mafia types involved that Digital Extremes seems to want you to care about, but all they really do is hang around spouting typical New York gangster jargon while constantly stroking your character's ego. Truthfully, the only two characters that you need to care about at all are Jackie, the mob boss who you'll spend the entire game controlling, and his dead girlfriend from the original Darkness, Jenny. Jackie is possessed by a demonic entity known only as The Darkness, and this entity grants him special abilities that he'll need to survive. Jenny plays a part not entirely dissimilar to that of Nicole in Dead Space 2, frequently popping up in flashback-style hallucinations as Jackie goes about the business of murdering half the population of New York. Neither is particularly likeable or complex, but Digital Extremes still manages to spin a relatively interesting tale around them.
Interestingly, for a large portion of the game you'll be left wondering whether you are really the demon-possessed mobster that you think you are. That uncertainty is a pretty powerful story elements, and its emphasized all the more by the fact that The Darkness 2's action sequences are frequently broken up by jarring trips to a mysterious mental institution in which you are told that you are delusional. I won't spoil the outcome, but I will tell you that the old "am I crazy?" narrative structure works out pretty well for The Darkness 2. The same is true for the flopping of the game's antagonists throughout the story. You can never really be quite sure whether Victor, a man attempting to steal The Darkness from you, or The Darkness itself is the greater enemy. It's all done very well from a narrative standpoint, and I'd be lying if I said that I didn't enjoy the story. It's a shame, then, that the excellent narrative is tainted by distastefully violent scripted events and vanilla gameplay.
The level of violence and adult content in The Darkness 2 really can't be overstated. The game is, without a doubt, the single most violent piece of software I've ever laid my hands on. "Oh good!" some of you might say, but I would have to disagree. A lot of The Darkness 2's violence and depravity doesn't come across as mature; it comes across as disturbingly unnecessary. For instance, one scene opens with Jackie's hands being nailed to a cross right in front of the player. Perhaps this was meant to serve as some sort of religious analogy, but it just comes across as repulsive. The same is true of a later scene in which you are locked screaming into an iron maiden and cooked alive over an open flame. Hell, you even have to watch and listen as a thug viciously stabs an old woman to death while she chokes on her own blood. Pretty grisly stuff. Granted, an attempt is made to justify these things by (very loosely) tying them into the narrative, but I wound up finding them far more off-putting than impactful. Several times I was actually a little nauseated by the extreme violence, and that is saying a lot coming from a gamer who's seen just about all there is to see out there in the world of games. The Darkness 2 doesn't only revel in gratuitous violence, either; it also features a scene portraying what may be the most graphic non-Hot Coffee depiction of sex I've ever seen in a game. Again, this scene feels entirely unnecessary given the fact that some muffled moaning through the walls could have sent the same message in a slightly more tasteful way.
The Darkness 2's overemphasis on extreme brutality carries over into the gameplay, as well. As you progress through the campaign, Jackie will unlock a small but shocking array of uber-nasty finishing moves to use on his enemies. Some of these moves are relatively simple-ripping off a man's head, for instance-but others really push the envelope. One, called the Wishbone, sees you tearing a screaming man in half from groin to crown by yanking his legs in opposite directions while another allows you to butcher a body until only a mutilated leg remains. It's all a bit much, and I soon found the satisfaction of the finishing moves outweighed by a growing realization that all the carnage and gore were simply a cover for what would otherwise be a very middle-of-the-road title.
You see, the biggest problem with the Darkness isn't that it's overly violent or disgusting (though it is both of those things, to be sure); it's that the game uses its shock value to mask its glaring flaws. I suspect that Digital Extremes hoped that players would be too mesmerized or grossed out by The Darkness 2's ridiculous gore levels to notice that the game simply isn't very good, and I am sure that will be the case for a lot of players. In my case, I found that if I made a mental effort to tune out the showers of blood and flying body parts the only thing that was left was a mediocre game full of design elements ranging from highly questionable to downright poor. As is the case with most products intended to shock an audience, if you strip away all of The Darkness 2's fluff you're left with a deeply flawed, insecure piece of work cowering in the proverbial corner of the video game classroom because it correctly assumed that it couldn't hang with the big boys without acting out.
On a basic level, The Darkness 2's gameplay will be nearly instantly familiar to anyone who's played a first-person shooter in the last three years. You simply advance through a series of linear areas killing everything you come into contact with. There are a couple of wrinkles thrown in to spice things up, however. The most notable of these are Jackie's demon arms. These nasty little limbs are essentially razor sharp tentacles tipped with a tiny, living demon's head. Jackie can use both of these arms in conjunction with the normal assortment of handguns, SMGs, and assault rifles. Slicing an enemy in half, turning around and shooting his friend in the face, and then impaling their leader with a metal pipe can be thrilling, and when it manages to hit its rhythmic combat stride The Darkness 2 really shines. There's also an RPG-lite system in place that allows you to upgrade Jackie's abilities using Essence that you collect from fallen foes. None of the upgrades are particularly awe inspiring and the system could be better, but it's still nice to see a shooter attempt to build in a little bit of character development. The game even includes a New Game + option. Now that's rare for a shooter.
If that all sounds good to you, brace yourself; The Darkness 2's successes on the gameplay front are easily and quickly overshadowed by the fact that the game is chock full of problems, oversights, and poor design decisions. First and foremost among these is the absolutely horrid implementation of a light/dark system. The Darkness hates light of any sort, so if Jackie comes into contact with light sources he loses his demonic abilities and his health regeneration stops. This isn't necessarily a bad concept, but it loses a lot of its shine once you realize that The Darkness 2's archaic lighting system often makes it damn near impossible to find the source of the light that's harming you, especially in the middle of a raging battle. This issue is compounded by the fact that the screen will fade to a blurred black and white filter when Jackie is in the light, making it even more difficult to find those pesky light fixtures. Even if you do manage to find the lights before you die, there are often so many of them that you'll never have time to shoot them all out before you're turned into tiny pieces of Jackie brisket.
That's still not all that's wrong with the system, either. Digital Extremes has also made frequent use of a combination of two enemy types that turn an already frustrating mechanic into an absolute nightmare. One of these types carries a portable flashlight that must be shot out and the other carries a whip that can rip the firearm that you need to do that right out of your hands. The upshot of this decision was that I frequently found myself being barbequed by a flashlight as well as standard light sources with no gun and no way to use my demonic abilities. Not fun.
The Darkness 2 also suffers from some terrible scripting errors. I had to reload multiple checkpoints due to a glitch that prevented me from completing objectives if I had gotten even a little ahead of where the game wanted me to be. This usually occurs because of missing an enemy before crossing an invisible objective trigger line, and it's completely irreversible as far as I can tell. Even killing the remaining enemy won't activate the objective. I can't even express how frustrating it is to fight through a huge room full of enemies only to be told to activate a panel that you are unable to activate because you moved too quickly and confused the game. The issue even occurred during the game's final climactic moments, forcing me to redo the entire section and absolutely killing any impact the sequence could have had on me. This kind of hard scripting died half a decade ago, and it died for good reason. Why Digital Extremes decided to bring it back I'll never know.
Even outside of its big issues, The Darkness 2 never manages to feel as polished as it pretends to be. The player's field of view is far, far too zoomed in to be comfortable-a problem exacerbated by the huge amount of screen clutter caused by dual wielding weapons along with both your demon arms. The game's controls range from utterly unresponsive at the lowest sensitivity settings to twitchier than a grand mal seizure victim at anything above the midpoint, the constant "tap X to destroy" hassles are a complete bore, and the enemy AI seems intent on running up and giving you a hug even if they are carrying assault rifles. Add to all this a nasty habit of spawning enemies behind you, repetitive, uninspired boss battles, and enemy variety that basically boils down to armored or unarmored, and you've got an experience that's more likely to bore and irritate than entertain and stimulate.
A series of cooperative missions called Vendettas make up The Darkness 2's multiplayer suite. These missions are pretty cleverly tied into the main campaign's story even if they wind up coming off as a bit contrived when it comes to their structure. The Vendetta missions allow you to choose from four other people possessed by The Darkness (Jackie is not included here), each of whom has their own special weapon and talent tree to climb. The levels are relatively short –about 15 minutes each-and there aren't very many of them, but slaughtering baddies alongside three of your friends is undeniably entertaining. Vendetta's animations are a little jumpy and there are a few frame drops here and there when the action heats up, but overall I have to admit that I enjoyed the mode. Players interested in leveling up all of the available characters could potentially get quite a bit of enjoyable play time out of the mode, and that makes a worthy addition in my book even if it isn't quite as fleshed out as I'd have liked it to be.
In the end, The Darkness 2 never really manages to measure up to the giants of the single-player/cooperative first-person shooter world. It boasts some spectacular sound design and an outstanding narrative, a competent co-op mode, and a few interesting tweaks to the FPS formula, but it's continually hampered by outdated or downright bad design. The game attempts to cover these flaws with an excessive emphasis on extreme violence, but no amount of blood and guts can conceal the fact that The Darkness 2 is little more than a mediocre FPS with a few good ideas and, frankly, these days that just won't cut it. Avoid.