The Darkness II Review

Blood, guts, violence, humour and piddle. The Darkness II has everything I've just mentioned by the truck load and it's not afraid to shower you with it either. The story of Jackie Estacado is one of revenge and internal torment as he not only battles with the army wanting the Darkness from Jackie, but also battles with the Darkness itself.

So the game kicks off with what we would class as a typical FPS level, it's just you, your gun and the enemies, your restaurant is under attack and you have to make it out alive. All of this is presented in an attractive cel shaded style, akin to the likes of Borderlands and XIII, but sways more towards the real world look rather than cartoony texture work.

Unfortunately this attack has provoked the very thing Jackie has been battling to keep under control, and now it's out for bloody vengeance. This is where we're introduced to the disturbing Darkness, an entity of pure evil and loves nothing more than tearing your foe a new one. This introduces the player to the quad method of attacking your enemies; you have the standard single firearm/dual wield/rifle/shotgun FPS inventory, then you have two tentacles of death protruding from your body.

The left tentacle is used for grabbing environmental elements, enemies and consuming hearts of the fallen to keep you alive while the right tentacle is used for slicing and dicing your foes into tiny pieces of gibbage.

A little further into the game and you're introduced to your Darkling companion, who simply refers to you as 'Monkey', a cheeky little chap in a Union Jack vest and accompanied by a fairly crappy cockney accent. This little fellow loves nothing more than tearing at the throats of your enemies then dropping a rather noxious fart on the corpse or peeing on them from a great height.

The usefulness of your Darkling becomes more apparent later in the game as he runs off to find essential elements to defeat a boss, or for you to take control of in order to explore further in the map to unlock a door that you cannot pass.

During your skirmishes with the various assailants you'll gain dark essence points which are used as currency in order to unlock powers and abilities to augment Jackie. When you first look at the purchase screen you're greeted with what can only be described as a spyrograph talent tree, but it's fairly easy to follow.

The circle of talents is split into four sections, each specifying on one area of Jackie's abilities with weaponry or the powers of The Darkness. So you could enable some form of insect swarm ability which disable your foes, forcing them to drop weapons as they flail around in an attempt to swat the insects, this gives you a valuable opening to dispatch the enemies with ease. Other talents include simply increasing Jackie's health pool, or reducing reload times etc. So plan your talents carefully as one wrong purchase could make the end game just a little tougher on yourself.

Most of the game's humour comes from the dialogue between yourself and the Darkling and did make me genuinely laugh at times which is a nice change to the myriad of soulless, voiceless protagonists we usually get in FPS titles.

As the evil entity that resides in Jackie is known as the Darkness, then it's obvious that it does not like the light, which brings us to the annoying mechanic of all your powers disappear if you're exposed to something stronger than a 20w light bulb and therefore must be blown to bits in order to carry on using tentacle destruction.

This weakness of Jackie's is known to the assailants that are in pursuit hoping to extract the Darkness from you, so you will encounter squads of enemies where one of which is carrying quite the powerful flashlight on them. However, a couple of .45 ACP rounds in their direction will normally ruin that overgrown torch of theirs. A couple of plot twists and hallucinations of a mental asylum complete the story for the single player campaign which will take the competent FPS player around 5 hours to complete, which isn't that long in all honesty.

There is a co-operative mode bundled into this game though which uses the same locations as the single player component but puts you into the shoes of one of four possible hit-persons which tie into Jackie's mafia syndicate. One female and three male darkness powered assassins can jump into a game online to complete a hit on a target, while the powers are similar to Jackie, they don't have mutated tentacles, but rather something more unique to their abilities.

This vendetta mode can be run solo offline or with up to three friends online and serves as a fairly reasonable filler after a mediocre single player campaign, though it's worth noting that you do get an option of a New Game + mode after completing the title, allowing you to re-run the game with all the talents and powers that you unlocked during your first run.

Even though the overall lifespan can seem fairly short for The Darkness II, it definitely entertains you throughout your playtime with the game, while some questionable voice acting is in the game, especially with the stereotypical mafia family voices, there are one or two unsung heroes in the VO department that really make their characters shine so make sure you pay close attention to Johnny Powell, he's just outstanding.

So if you are in the market for an entertaining bloody visceral in your face shooter then you have a safe bet with The Darkness II.