Charlie Murphy! Darkness!
I was thinking about how I still need to play through the 360 version of Chronicles of Riddick, not enough time these days, so soon hopefully. Then it made me think of the last game I played from the developers of Riddick, Starbreeze Studios, a lil number called The Darkness. This came out almost exactly 2yrs ago, I played it on the 360.
The Good – Compelling first-person shooter/adventure in which you play a mobster on his 21st birthday who just happens to have a hit put out on him from his boss. At the same time something evil known as The Darkness awakens in you which adds an interesting twist to it’s standard first-person shooting gameplay, the ability to combine the shooting with supernatural powers such as tentacles to thrash your enemies and a group of little demons who help to do your bidding. Powers and abilities upgrade as you move along the storyline. The graphics, sound/music, story, voice acting all combine in creating an atmosphere that I can best describe as The Sopranos meets Tales from the Crypt, weird, but it’s interesting. The adventure portion has you strolling parts of New York, riding the subways, meeting with your girlfriend and family, running errands and more with an open world feel. It all helps to flesh out the characters and story, even makes you care about some characters. Some levels take place in what seems to be hell, helps to keep things fresh.
The Bad – It doesn’t take long for the open world portions to feel restrictive, since they are. Some objectives aren’t explained well, so you can keep wandering the streets and subways wondering just what the heck do you have to do. While everything visually happens in-game such as cut-scenes, your character is shown combining powers in bad ass ways to destroy his enemies, you just can’t do them yourself. You have to stick to the dark for your powers and such to regenerate, while it makes sense in the narrative, it can be frustrating gameplay-wise at times. Multiplayer portion is mediocre, the development time on that would’ve been better spent on improving flaws in the single player campaign.
The Ugly – Having your character devouring enemies hearts to improve his powers, nasty!
