He runs along with you, cracks jokes, occasionally farts on corpses, and will attack enemies for you. The Darkling has also received a major facelift from the previous game, and is now more of a sidekick than a tool. There are several, but the most useful abilities can all be unlocked by about the halfway point, including some truly gruesome execution moves. It just feels smooth to aim and fire, and Digital Extremes found a proper balance between enemy strength and the strength of the weapons.Īs you progress you earn points for the creativity of the kill, which gives you the chance to unlock new abilities. It’s been a while since there was a good, ol’ fashioned controversy about the graphic nature of games.įor as fun as the tentacles are to use, the firearms are also balanced well for either dual-wielding, or using a weapon alone with the ability to aim. Now, I’ve played a lot of gruesome games in my day, but a few of these animations made me stop and say “damn.” Someone, somewhere is going to have a major problem with the gore in this game. You can use the tentacles to throw objects, use items as a shield, or rip people and objects. There is a sense of freedom in the brutality. The combination can be brutal and amazing. The left Darkness tentacle can be used to grab items-including people-while the right is used for slashing. If you were playing from the POV of an average enemy, Jackie would be one of the hardest boss fights ever. It almost feels unfair, like you are playing on easy while the enemy AI is playing on hard. But when they aren’t around, you can go utterly ballistic and tear through dozens of enemies in horrible and awesome ways. Later in the game, you will face troopers that know what the Darkness is, so they fight with light, which can cripple the Darkness and quickly lead to your death. It also does something else-it makes you feel almost invincible. It sounds simple enough, but the environments are designed to be destroyed, so the ability to quad-wield opens up so many possibilities. The thing that will no doubt get the most attention from The Darkness II, and rightly so, is the ability to quad-wield weapons and the Darkness tentacles. It also means that there is no sense of exploration, which would be fine, but you can tear through an entire level in minutes if you want. From the moment the game begins, there is almost no slowdown in the action with a few minor exceptions that exist for the sake of exposition, which you need to hear to put the finale in context. The pacing is both a blessing and a curse. One thing though is that it never stops, and never slows down. It is extremely dark and bloody, but also compelling and entertaining. The story is fairly concise, but still delivers plenty of twists and surprises. The entity known as the Darkness is having none of it, and manages to manipulate Jackie, who finds himself stuck in the middle of a struggle that is much bigger than man. As Jackie investigates-and by investigate I mean he basically rips people in two until someone talks-he discovers that the attack is part of a much bigger plot by an OG secret organization known as the Brotherhood that wants to use the Darkness to its own nefarious ends. The protagonist (definitely not the “hero”) Jackie Estacado is living large as the Don of a NY mafia family, eating at the fancy restaurants, dining with the ladies like a boss, and trying to forget that the love of his life was brutally murdered.Īn attack on Jackie forces him to release the malevolent supernatural entity known as the Darkness, in order to rip through scores of red shirt-like thugs hired to die horribly. When The Darkness II picks up, a few years have passed since the events of the first game. There is the glimmer of a brilliance in The Darkness II, but there are also a few issues that stunt this game’s potential growth.
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