Review: The Darkness II

I always felt that The Darkness series was a strange beast. A Frankenstein of sorts, lovingly coddled together with divergent ideas and a fantastic narrative. The horror-esque storyline mixed with the Mafia family backdrop works extremely well, and reminds me of that special Old Western Sci-fi mixture that made Firefly such a hit. The original Darkness took this narrative soup and served it with traditional graphics in a semi-open world. Doused heavily in story, it was a solid game but not one without its share of technical problems and overall lack of polish. But there was certainly something there, a nest of ideas yearning, and just beginning to break free from a prison of technical inadequacy. If you're wondering if The Darkness II succeeds where the original has failed, yet still brings that spark... just read on.

The Darkness II (Xbox 360)
Developer: Digital Extremes
Publisher: 2K Games
Release Date: February 7th, 2012 (NA)

First off, this is not The Darkness game you remember from Starbreeze Studios. Instead it has been gutted, vivisected and churned until it bears little resemblance to its predecessor. Sure, you still play the part of Jackie Estacado who is still using – and internally fighting with – The Darkness within, but the world you are in is a much brighter place thanks to the change in aesthetic from realistic to cell shaded graphics. They look fantastic from an artistic sense, and do a great job of evoking the graphic novel upon which the game is based. The graphics have much more in common with the old PS2/Xbox shooter XIII than anything Borderlands, and have just enough going on to provide a detailed world without bombarding the player with overdrawn landscapes.

The visual aesthetics also provide a good backdrop for The Darkness II's campy level of violence. Through execution kills you'll be tearing enemies limb from limb, ripping off their heads, and pulling their spines from their anus. It is the stuff of Caligula's wet dreams, and if done in realistic style, might seem a bit excessive with the serious nature of the story. The cell shaded graphics, however, gives the violence a comical absurdity that seems to work. But here the graphics are a bit of a double-edged sword. Everything in The Darkness II is imbued with this overarching sense of comical ridiculousness and it unfortunately gets in the way of the narrative on more than one occasion. Despite this, the narrative in The Darkness II is still very well done.

Taking a page from the original game, The Darkness II's tale is one of loss, love, and alternative realities. It's a narrative of stark contrasts, where the very gritty streetwise world of the Mafioso is commingled with the temporal world of the Arcane, a world that seemingly has no limits. Jacky, and the player, walk the fine line between the two and his sometimes awkward interactions with those around him reflect this duality with great precision. Members of his crime family, though dependent on his power seem also completely terrified by it. They refer to it as simply “His thing” or “That thing that you do.” The NPCs here are not living in a vacuum. They are in this strange world with you. The writing and narration gets it across that all they wanted to do was make some money and smash some heads, and now they have evil serpents flying all over the place spilling their special sauce.

The narration is what really nails it, and for what is essentially a first-person shooter, The Darkness II has a ton of it. I probably spent just as much time going around and listening to all the dialogue of the NPCs as I did going around shooting people. And even for all of its stereotyping there are aspects of it which are fantastically subtle. It really is just a shame that these characters were not flushed out further. For all intents and purposes they are simply there as dialogue machines. Good as they are, if the game would have opened itself up a little more, there would have been fantastic opportunities for many of these characters. And open is not what I would call The Darkness II.

The game is a fairly linear affair which will have you going from one level to the next, shooting bad guys, tearing up bad guys, and then going on to the next level. And here is Darkness II's greatest weakness: the gameplay never diverges very far away from that. Don't get me wrong, it is a fully capable shooter which does its craft well, but considering the universe, and the open-ended possibilities that having an ability like The Darkness grants you, it fails to realize its full potential. The Darkness powers have been supplemented with purchasable abilities, but the core Darkness powers have been scaled back. You'll no longer explore vents and kill enemies with a slithering tentacle. You'll no longer be able to call upon multiple Darklings with different uses. Instead, they have incorporated more shooter-based mechanics to your abilities by allowing you to wield an additional throwing weapon with your left side and do melee attacks with your right. This new direction creates action which is exceptionally visceral, mostly fun and extremely fluid. It also, however, creates a sort of sensory overload monotony which causes each level to appear very much like the last until they all seemed ground together into one big bloody soup without flavor.

The best parts of The Darkness II are actually when there is no combat and the story takes over. Those quiet moments where you're exploring the world and trying to put the fabric of your reality back together again. These segments are well needed respites from the grinder-like pace the shooting sequences set but come completely segregated from the action. The walls that separate the 'now you are killing people' parts from the 'now your are doing story stuff' parts couldn't be thicker, and it's a shame that the integration of these two styles wasn't done with more grace. The fluidity found in the combat simply doesn't seep over to the rest of the game, and surely not in the way the narrative is presented. The differing sections of the game seem overbearingly segregated, the final level seems completely out of place and the ending comes in such a rush that it took me a moment to realize that the game was actually over.

It's just another aspect of The Darkness II's strange brand of dualism. The story is fantastic, but is presented haphazardly, the violence is exquisitely horrific, yet comical at the same time. Even the graphics -which fit the game- take a severe downturn when Jackie is doing his monologues between levels. Then there is the shoehorned Vendetta missions which are a 4-player cooperative offshoot from the main story. It's a Left 4 Dead style online component that lacks any of the gripping story motivations of the single player game, and all of the thrash-and-kill gameplay which sometimes bog it down.

But for all the above, The Darkness II is still a fun game. The combat sequences, though tiring in large doses, can be exceptionally fun and fluid. The story, though sometimes offered clumsily, is still gripping and will have you – at one point – in a wonderful state of confusion as to what might actually be happening to Jackie. For all my complaints, I still felt myself going back to it, replaying chapters in Game + mode, talking to NPCs that I might have missed, and maybe trying to squeeze out of the game those few aspects that I feel were only just missed. If only by a hair.

Score: 80%

(80-89%: Great - Only very minor issues get in the way of greatness.)