The Darkness 2

Game Info

Jackie Estacado has a problem – he has a darkness inside him.  And not just the darkness of soul that all men experience in their lives; the actual embodiment of darkness – an eons-old sentience that is pissed off and has tentacles.  This sentience revealed itself when poor Jackie turned 21 in the first Darkness game, and now 2 years later, it’s back to rip some more hearts out.

Darkness 2 is the FPS where, as Jackie, you’ve kept your evil powers with a mind of their own at bay for a few years.  You’ve risen to the top of the mafia family where you were once just an assassin, but during dinner one night, a shadowy organization attacks and you’ve got to destroy them before they destroy you.  It’s told in an almost-entirely first-person viewpoint, with weird interludes where Jackie talks to the camera while sitting in a chair.  And although the gunplay is good and the ultraviolence is gruesomely satisfying, the strange inconsistencies and extremely short playtime really hamper this game.

Like the evil organization after your powers, known as The Brotherhood.  How many games have you played where you’re fighting a group called The Brotherhood?  I can think of 4 off the top of my head.  They’re the keepers of the darkness, and although Jackie wrestles with this symbiotic being inside his soul and fights it, he refuses to give it up.  The only way The Brotherhood can get the darkness into their magical containment box is by trapping Jackie – but they only attempt this at night.  If they went out and picked him up at the grocery store on a Tuesday morning, the darkness (which only comes out in the dark) would be helpless.  Some enemies carry flashlights – why not just attack during the day?  It’s just so inconsistently silly that it’s hard to overlook.

The campaign maxes out at 5 hours.  That’s the single-player, character-driven revenge plot while trying to hash out your psychosis and bring your dead girlfriend back to life while escaping a mental hospital that doesn’t actually exist.  5 hours.  It’s a lot to get in there, so everything moves along pretty briskly, lending itself to a disjarring quality that actually works pretty well.  Jackie is mentally broken, and the sudden locale changes and lack of explanation help to bring that feeling of uneasiness to bear.  Two equally-interesting endings shore up the plot, and while neither is particularly satisfying, they are both a worthwhile experience.  And since the game is only 5 hours long, you can see both in one long play session.

The multiplayer campaign is a series of one-off missions involving a team of low-level thugs in Jackie’s gang, all of which have a darkness power in some capacity.  They’re your stereotypical gang members; gun girl, black voodoo guy, japanese swordsman, and drunk irishman.  In some respect they all have one of the main darkness powers you’ll unlock in the main game, so each feels like only a portion of the powerful guy you become.  But you probably won’t notice, since the entirety of the multiplayer game is 3 hours long, with some missions over in less then 5 minutes.  The plot meshes with the single-player campaign in a tangential way, so you’ll hear references to either one in the other.  Again, the violence is everywhere and hypergory, but 3 hours?!  At least the voicechat works well.

Darkness 2’s graphics are a pretty big departure from most of today’s first-person shooters.  It’s an almost-cell shaded, heavy ink style that harkens back to its comic book roots.  Everything has a thick black outline and very heavy saturation.  It’s a little off-putting to begin with, but makes sense in the context of the game – and goes very well with the extremely violent gameplay.  It’s much easier to watch comic book characters get ripped in half (or quarters), have a black tentaclemonster punch through their chest, or get sucked into a black hole.  A more realistic art direction would have, counter-intuitively, seemed less realistic (what with the tentacles and all).  Just, be prepared, is all.  This game relishes in its M rating.  It’s as violent a game I’ve seen in a long while, and not just with shooting.  There’s rough sex and implied rape, crucifixion, and some very poignant mental disease imagery.  If the graphics were realistic, this would be snuff, so the comic look works very well.

The sound design works mostly well, too.  Jackie’s accent tumbles around from Hispanic to Italian to Brooklyn, and everyone else in the game is pretty distinctly themselves.  Music and sound effects are present – not overbearing, but only really underwhelming in a few cases (seriously, can’t any game get shotguns right?).  There’s a ton of dialogue, and Jackie’s occasional soliloquies always end on an open note, like he’s telling a story.  And then there’s The Darkness itself, voiced by Mike Patton.  Patton, for those who aren’t familiar, has been a singer in a number of bands, and has done some voice work in games before – most notably Portal.  His vocal range is astonishing, and can carry all sorts of mind-bending inflections that, I’ve read, don’t require any computer retouching.  Add the fact that this is kinda his thing, and you get the perfect voice for the being that is The Darkness.

Overall, Darkness 2 is a net positive experience for the desensitized crowd.  It’s outrageously gory, mature, and a little bit brain-warping.  Patton’s amazing take as The Darkness it the easy highlight of the game – he’s really that good.  Shooting and tentacle-destroying bad guys with a light scoring system keeps things brisk, but ultimately the game’s time investment is so slight that you’ll wonder what else is next.  It was a 5 year wait between The Darkness and The Darkness 2 – do we wait another 5 years for 5 hours of gameplay?