I had played and finished this games sequel, The Darkness 2 because that game is on Steam whereas The Darkness 1 is exclusive to Xbox 360/Ps3. I had heard how the sequel was made by a different developer entirely, and how its tone and style was changed to be more cartoony than the first game. I had a decent time with the sequel, but finally after a long time I got a opportunity to get the original The Darkness on Xbox 360.
The game starts off in a car chase where your working with the Mafia. Some deal goes bad and you lose the money you were supposed to get to your Uncle Pauley. Then, basically the whole game is this series of events surrounding this guy being pissed off at you and wanting you dead. The premise may seem simple, a run of the mill mafia story - but no. The character you play as, Jackie, isnt just some typical Italian mobster. He's this brooding, edgy, long haired gothic metalhead cynical type. So it's this bizarre contrast of being surrounded by like Goodfella's type characters and dialogue, but then the main character is so out of place, but also somehow a part of their family and operation. It's like, imagine a punk rocker Mohawk guy hanging out with The Sopranos. It's two different worlds. But here, it only serves to make the plot and game that much more interesting and strange.
Very soon into the game I was just really impressed with the graphics. Its a 2007 game for fuck sakes. It looks better than modern games like Starfield. Graphics really have not improved much past 2007, it seems. Diminishing returns. The models for the character faces, the lighting, the physics system, the attention to details like your hair and coat having physics, seeing yourself in the mirror, being able to look down at your legs and feet, the way your guns clash up against the wall automatically when you get too close and how the arm animations change depending on what angles youre looking at - the game overall has this really professional polish to it that really makes it feel ahead of its time. The animations and the weight of the bullet impacts are great too, shooting enemies they react dramatically flailing around to the ground almost reminds me of the physics in Gta IV.
The gameplay here is a psuedo open-world single player shooter campaign, but it has a lot of oddities in its design. For the first couple hours it takes awhile to wrap your head around what the game expects from you navigation wise. There are no objective markers or much in the way of helpful navigation. You press the select button to pull up your inventory, and it will give you some hints of what it expects you to do in the form of a few lines of text, but it isnt always clear where the location it wants you to go is. This got me quite frustrated in the beginning, as I began walking around in circles over and over having no idea what to do feeling annoyed, which is made worse by the extremely slow movement speed. Eventually, however, I realized the games Subway system is the main 'hub' of the game, and even more - there are these helpful navigation stations inside the subway that will give you directions of places you want to go, like real life memorizing the street names and stuff, but I feel like the game could of done a better job pointing these out to the player, maybe make one of the missions to go to one of these things as a tutorial or something, because its really easy to miss them and spend a lot of time scratching your head left clueless. Frequently the game will be vague about what it wants you to do or where youre supposed to talk to someone when really all you have to do is find a phone and call the guy. I do appreciate how immersive the game tries to be and how 'grounded' everything is, like having to navigate yourself using maps and directions and using phones. The game at times feels like it takes inspiration from RPG games like Oblivion which was famous at the time, because of how many npc's you talk to and how you can choose what dialogue you want to say to them, also the music in these subway stations starts playing some calm mystical theme that sounds like something out of Oblivion which I thought was funny.
At first the combat is simple, you have two pistols each can shoot with right and left triggers and you go through relatively linear street city type levels killing mobsters, though the difficulty is still fairly challenging. It has easy/medium/hard. I picked medium. Even on medium you can die very quickly if you dont know what youre doing. And once again I feel like the game could have explaiend its mechanics better, because it took me a few hours in to realize that there is an entire mechanic where if you stand in lighter areas, you have less health. Eventually I realized that in the main menu there is a Darkness tab where you can read all your different mechanics and it explains as such. So then a lot of the game is about shooting out lights and lamps and trying to stay inside the darkness as it increases your shield. The controls can be weird to learn too, because sometimes if youre standing in too much light and you press the Darkness button, the monsters will just refuse to come out and make a sort of sizzle noise, something I couldn't understand what was happening until many hours into the game when I realized what was going on. Still, the visual indicators for these things are a bit vague and its hard to know exactly how much health you have, or how much the darkness adds to your shield. But when standing in very well lit areas, its not uncommon to die in 2 shots, however standing in darker areas you can take a lot more bullets. I learned that the hard way and died quite a few times before realizing. The game could definitely explain its mechanics better or slowly teach them to you with objectives, but sadly it doesnt. Eventually you start getting a large arsenal of weapons, shotguns, assault rifles, uzis, tons of different dual wield pistols. Much of the game does center around dual wielding, but when you get shotguns and assault rifles you use both your hands. Another point in favor of the impressive graphics and attention to detail is, when you slightly hold down the Trigger, you can see your finger slightly moving to pull on the trigger and it only shoots when you push far enough. Cant say i've ever seen a game do that, its a very nice touch.
You can spawn these 4 little demon goblin guys at various fixed points around the maps to help you do things. Usually some stuff like needing them to unlock gates or doors but also they help you in combat like being a chaingun wielding machine gunner,a melee guy, a suicide bomber guy, and one that kills lights. They didnt seem like totally fleshed out but it was a neat little additional mechanic to play with.
The game really shines with its narrative, atmosphere, and story. Everytime you enter a loading screen or change areas you get a scripted cutscene of the protagonist standing in a black area just talking to himself or commenting on whats going on. Sometimes its picked from a random pool of things, but other times its guaranteed to get a certain context specific cutscene. The writing is very entaining, at times its really almsot juvenile as if its what a bunch of edgy 13 year old highschoolers would sound cool. Like constantly saying the word Darkness, calling everything Dark Dark Dark. Its Dark, its So dark, its darker than dark. The darkest around. The darkness inside me, Pitch black darkness, super duper dark. Like yeah, it gets pretty silly sometimes. But it has that endearing campy vibe to it that makes me appreciate it more, its just entertaining. Especially the whole Mafia plot and everyone around you talking in that Mobster accent while your guy is responding to them in a completely different tone. You meet all sorts of interesting characters, and theres even lots of NPC's roaming around the subway that will talk to you if you stand in front of them. Sometimes they even give you side quests to complete, and I did a fair good amount of them. Though, it wasnt obvious what completing the side quests unlock besides maybe some "extra content" like concept artworks, it was still fun to see what all the different characters had to offer. Like that one mini-quest where the old lady throws some coins on the railroad tracks and asks to see if you can get them back before getting killed.
Of course the game centers around 'The Darkness' which is like this evil entity that resides within you, almost enslaving you to do its bidding. It makes the game feel like this schizophrenic nightmare where the voices in your head are lying to you or misleading you, but your character is also sane enough to recognize it, so the game is constantly fucking with you saying "Wrong way, jackie!" or "Dont do that..." but its what you're supposed to do, making it this interesting dilemma like: Do I trust the voices in my head? Or are they messing with me!
The Darkness gives you special powers, though once again the mechanics for them arent made very clear. You press a button to bring out these snake demons from your sides, and they help to illuminate the enviornment and highlight different objects and enemies, also they have special abilities that you slowly unlock, but sadly I never found most of them all that useful. Usually they are mandatory for progression but other than that they dont really add to the gameplay. At first you have this crawling snake ability used to crawl through some specific vents to unclock doors, then you get this tentacle arm whip/grabbing move you need to move objects sometimes to progress, then you unlock Darkness Guns which are these guns with infinite ammo, but only when youre sufficiently standing in the darkness (?) something that , once again, I didnt realize for a long time. Lastly you get this black hole ability that I guess seemed cool at first, But I never ended up using it much. Additionally, each enemy you kill you can walk up to and press A to 'Devour heart' - Now, it's not clear exactly what this does either. When you consume every so many, it says "Darkness Powers Upgraded" ...but again, I never really knew what that does either! A lot of the mechanics are sort of nebulous and left myself wondering what the hell anything does, even halfway into the game. Still, it was satisfying as the animations and the general level of polish on everything is fun to engage with.
The game has a wide variety of scenarios and events it puts you through, it is an eventful game, never feels that boring except the times when I was running in circles wondering what to do. One moment youre inside your girlfriend Jenny's apartment, hanging out with her on the couch, then the next youre having these nightmarish delusions(?) of World War 1 surrounded by guys with sewn up faces fighting in the trenches, the game has a lot of mature themes and dark grit to it like theres multiple instances of Suicide, from both the main character and even in the trenches theres a "Suicide corner" where you see a soldier blow his own head off. Theres parts where you have wounded soldiers laying in beds with all their limbs blown off begging for nurses, the game is grim. Then the next moment youre back in 'reality' shooting your way through slaughterhouses, or going through a drug den to steal some briefcase off a mob boss, another time you're breaking into some ship to murder everyone and the captain. There's never really a dull moment, the pacing is pretty great, and I even do appreciate the moments of down time in between the subway stations looking for directions, checking maps, using the Payphone to listen to the silly optional collectable dialogues.
The narrative is engaging enough where it keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time, at first you were just trying to avoid getting killed by this mob boss Paulie, but then you watch him murder your girlfriend right in front of eyes, then youre on this hell-bent rampage to get back at him. When you finally do, the game ends. Wraps it up nicely.
The atmosphere is immersive the whole time, the whole thing has this aura of metalhead schoolkid about it. There are tv's around the world you can turn on and watch random stations,some of them blasting death metal. The soundtrack is a mix of metal and ambient stuff.
The only place where the game is a bit rough around the edges is I would say some of the direction and objectives, there are some places where the way to progress is really cryptic and obscure like this one part where you get locked in a room with exploding bombs all around you and it turns out you have to shoot this lock on a gate in some pitch black corner, that part really pissed me off and took awhile to figure out. The path forward isnt always obvious and it can make for some tedious or frustrating moments. Also like I said previously, the mechanics could of been explained better either through some short tutorials or these missions that introduce them to you, but the game kinda just throws them at you with no introduction really.
I have faint memories of Darkness 2 but I can see why people say it got a lot of things wrong. The tone was just way off, this first game is much more grim and mature but also has a great entertaining cheesy/campy vibe to it. I mostly had a blast playing through it, and especially have lots of praise for the presentation and overall graphics, physics, and fun impactful combat and even the enemy AI was pretty impressive. I also really liked how the whole game you're just fighting humans, believe it or not. Usually when games put in these dark fantasy elements you start fighting goblins or monsters and shit, but its a nice change of pace for once for you to be the weird demon possessed guy while still fighting ordinary people.
8/10
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