By Daniel Rutledge
I never played The Darkness and after seeing a fair bit of The Darkness II, I regret overlooking it quite a bit.
From what I saw of The Darkness II, it is the most stylistically brilliant game in a long time. Maybe since the first BioShock. Crysis 2 was graphically astounding, but The Darkness II has a beautiful, dark art design and style that is just so cool.
It’s basically going for a graphic novel meets film noir type thing. The images are all hand-painted and most objects have a comic book looking black outline around them. That might sound a bit shoddy, but trust me, it looks brilliant.
Mixing supernatural demonic elements into the mafia genre is a stroke of genius and seems to be handled in the game particularly well.
And then there’s the violence.
This game is ultra-violent, filled with a variety of different ways to tear people in half, impale them on stakes, behead them and shoot them to pieces. It’s very impressive how gory it gets at times. Sneaking up behind an enemy means you can perform an execution and these are perhaps the most grisly bits.
If an enemy has only just been killed, you can rip out their hearts and eat them in order to regain health.
Before describing the fantastic violence too much I should probably explain a bit more about the general gist of the game.
It follows on from the original and the scenes I saw were centred around cutscenes in a dungeon. Your character is nailed to a large crucifix and is being tortured and interrogated.
It’s very dark and violent and rather unpleasant in the first-person view. These scenes didn’t demonstrate how great the visual style was as well as the others, but still looked great and did push the violence levels pretty far.
The other parts of the game I saw in the preview session were flashbacks from that dungeon scene. The first took place in a restaurant filled with mafia guys with satisfyingly thick accents along with some beautiful ladies. I don’t want to spoil exactly how it happens as it’s a highly enjoyable shock, but all of a sudden violence erupts in the restaurant and you have to crawl out while shooting bad guys.
It’s a very cinematic scene with on-rails shooting action that was surprisingly fun to just sit and watch. I can’t wait to play it myself.
Shortly after this scene, your character grows a pair of huge, demon arms. These can be used in addition to your human arms to combat your enemies and are the cause of much of the violence described above.
You are joined by a Darkling – a little monkey-like demon with a thick cockney accent and a truly evil sense of mischievous fun. “Let’s go crack some f**king skulls!” he exclaims one minute, using the next to urinate on the corpse of a recently dispatched enemy.
The environments are generally highly interactive. There are objects to pick up and use everywhere and the way they’re incorporated into the gameplay in nicely entertaining ways. The majority of this was picking up stake like objects and firing them as spears to skewer your enemies.
The demon arms, in addition to your normal human arms, mean a whole range of new elements are fused with standard first-person shooter elements. At one point you could pick up a car door and hold it in front you with your demon arms, shooting through the window with your human arms. You could also throw the car door at your enemies as a weapon.
Picking up a second firearm to dual-wield displayed some quite nice dynamic animation too. Basically when you’re firing with two guns, depending on what position you’re in, you’ll automatically pull one of them up to aim down the sights. It’s hard to explain but it was a really cool element that I haven’t really seen done before.
There was a train crash in one of the scenes that showed off some of the dynamic lighting effects which were also very impressive.
Shooting out or smashing the lights to make darkness is a big part of game. Moving under a light source as a demon is no good – you start to burn up, as illustrated with some very nice visual and audio effects.
So it’s kind of like Alan Wake in reverse, you have to be in darkness to survive and the light hurts you. And that’s a very cool horror element that I enjoyed quite a bit, being a big fan of horror.
I hope the images above give you some idea of how the game looks, but they will be nothing compared to experiencing it on a nice big HD TV in a dark room late at night.
After the eyes-on preview I had I’m a fan and can’t wait to have a play through the whole thing.
The Darkness II is set for release on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on October 28.
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