Darkest of Days

I came to this game already writing the review in my head. I had seen what everyone else had said about it, I had played the demo and I had seen the screen shots. I was fully expecting to have this game anger and frustrate me and leave me wishing I had never played it. Amazingly, I was wrong.

This isn’t to say that the game is not bad, because over whelmingly it is. It lacks in all the major categories that a game needs to excel in to garner any sort of attention, story, graphics, mechanics and technology, but there is some X factor here that I’m having trouble putting my finger on. Something that comes from the sum of its parts that leaves me not regretting having played it; though I would have regretted buying it. 

The story and concept are something that once unfolded for me instantly struck me as amazing territory truly untouched by both major Hollywood and game publishers.   There have been forays into this idea, but never something as direct. You are Alexander Morris, a member of General Custer’s famously doomed company. The game starts with you fighting your way to the hill that Custer died on, you are hit by an arrow and are dying when you see Custer himself die. At the moment when it looks like you are going to shake loose your mortal coil, a bubble appears and a future type soldier steps out and tells you to jump in.

You’re then briefed that you have just been volunteered for a group of time travelers that roam time collecting research and doing studies, and fixing problems with the time line if they happen, and they do happen. Quite a bit, see there is another group of time travelers that is trying to change history. Meaning that during some pretty significant battles in history (nearly all of the times you deal with are based around a battle) there is another separate war being waged behind the scenes.

There are some Back to the Future moments and a few twists here and there, but for the most part the reason that a story with so much potential fails can be laid at the feet of whoever wrote the script, or set the rules down for what the script could contain. For example, the time between you waking up from your wounds in the future and your first mission appears to be somewhere around 5 minutes. That’s 5 minutes for someone from 1876 to adapt to the fact that he is now surrounded by tech at least 200 years in the future and then jump into a bubble and go do some dirt during the Civil War. Another example I can sum up in one sentence, you are freed from a German POW camp, then  told that you are the reason you are free and are forced to jump into a bubble to just before you are freed from the camp, to free yourself. 

It’s that level of inconsistency with the fiction (and blatant disregard for logic itself) that 8monkey Labs shows throughout this game that brings the whole story to its knees, yet for some reason… that didn’t kill this game for me.

The graphics are simply terrible. Textures are muddy and repeated constantly, at distance soldiers are not 3D models but sprites with two animations, right leg forward and right leg back to simulate running. Character models for both main characters and extras appear to number around four, leaving distinguishing friend from foe impossible and explosions, smoke and gun fire look like they fell straight out of a budget PC game from 2000. Yet for some reason… that didn’t kill this game for me either. 

Mechanically this game plays very much like any budget title shooter from Activision, which I was surprised to find out they had no hand in this game. Guns shoot straight enough, there is no cover and the levels are laid out just straight forward enough to keep you moving forward and not in a direction you are not supposed to be moving in. Furthermore the autosave system and checkpoint system trigger every hundred feet or so, meaning that if you are lucky most missions can be finished just by sprinting from point A to point B. 

Technically, this game fails on all levels, lights shine from wrong angles, shadows show through walls and many objects in the game appear to be simply texture with no substance behind them, allowing you or the enemy free reign to shoot through them. Any more than fifteen people on screen at once and the title slows to a crawl and I found multiple times where actions I was inputting into the game were either not being carried out or got stuck on, especially shooting. I would tap the trigger to let out a burst and instead empty my clip. Yet for some reason… well actually these things almost killed this game for me. 

There just seems to be something here that I enjoyed. None of these things were so abhorrent that I couldn’t suspend my belief and find some fun to be had. I was definitely sad that they barely scratched the surface of their premise, and even sadder that instead of delving deeper into their story and expanding it into what I could see as almost a “Time” Matrix type setting, where the history we know is a fragile lie that is being upheld by blah blah blah, I still found enough here that I wouldn’t mind recommending the game to someone I know can have fun with a non-AAA title.

However, I know that today the number of people that can have fun with a game this technically terrible is probably pretty small. Which is too bad, there is a world and premise here that is begging to be fully explored.