SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I have been playing a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full of razor blades.
Two years ago I finished 2007’s The Darkness and said that the FPS gameplay didn’t hold up in 2019. Some disagreed, but Youtuber Gmanlives, who specializes in FPS, came to the same conclusion in his recent series retrospective. A number of people said that I should play the sequel because it has more modern controls and a better shooter feel. This October I’m trying to get through my backlog of games with horror themes (even if they aren’t necessarily scary) so I booted up The Darkness II and gave it a shot. After making my way through the short campaign and dipping into the optional co-op side stories I’m of the opinion that…everyone was right. The Darkness II is to the first game like Terminator II is to Terminator, or Aliens to Alien, though it’s nowhere near the quality of either of those examples. It’s like them because it’s a more bombastic, louder, sequel that sacrifices some of the tension and atmosphere of its predecessor for streamlined action, while still maintaining enough thematic and story connections to feel like a satisfying follow up in the series.
The Darkness II puts you back in the shoes of early 20s mob boss Jackie Estacado. While it might seem impressive for someone so young to rise to the top of a field that often rewards seniority, Jackie has what one might term an unfair advantage in the form of an ancient evil that exists within him and grants him a number of powers that are very useful in the violent world of the mafia, including the ability to manifest demon arms that eat the hearts of his enemies, the ability to fling black holes out into the world and, notably, immortality. The big downside of these powers is that Jackie also has an evil voice that lives in his head and follows its own agenda, telling him to do certain things that aren’t necessarily in his interest, and using everything from torture to hallucinations to try and manipulate and control him. Every deal with the devil comes with fine print.
The game starts a couple years after the events in the first game, and Jackie has sort of forced the Darkness into hibernation within him and is living his life as a normal non-supernatural young mob boss. The game opens with a virtuoso sequence in a restaurant that shows off how much more cinematic games got between 2007 and 2012, and which sets the tone and structure of what’s to follow. The Darkness 1 was all about thick atmosphere and world building. It was a semi open world FPS at a time when that was still novel, and it featured a lot of backtracking and talking to NPCs in the subway, as well as unique missions in various neighborhoods of New York. The Darkness II ditches this structure for a linear shooter that occasionally puts you into a small, separate, area where you can talk to a few people and do some very basic fetch quest type stuff to advance the plot. This streamlined structure makes the game world feel much less lived in and more like the simple backdrop to a video game, but it also makes things less frustrating and repetitive. I wouldn’t say either approach is fundamentally better, but I think the first game manages to feel more unusual and special compared to the more cookie cutter approach of the sequel. Exploring the spaces in The Darkness 1 was very satisfying, with lots of unique side quests and collectables to uncover. The basic fetch quest pace breaks in The Darkness II feel obligatory and pretty boring. You walk around a mansion or an asylum, talk to a few people, trigger a cut scene and go on to the next mission. There’s some good writing and storytelling going on, but the guided tour structure just makes it all feel like going through the motions of a video game rather than actually guiding Jackie through his adventure (even though there aren’t any real choices in the first game.)
The characters and story also feel like they’ve been homogenized from the first game, even though many of the people you encounter are pulled from that title. Some of the voice actors have changed (including Jackie’s) but the main issue is that a lot of the weirdness has been removed in the streamlining. In the first game you could stumble upon random people who didn’t know Jackie but would ask him for a favor, and there were a ton of phone numbers to call with humorous or disturbing messages. In the second game everyone knows Jackie and who he is, and the interactions are all focused around exposition, talking about The Darkness or what’s going on, or character development, such as it is. The game’s sensibilities can be illustrated by a comedy character named Fat Tony who mostly talks about food and lusting after plus sized models. Everyone's kind of a caricature of some kind, and a lot of the subtlety and real emotion of the writing has been lost. It’s not that it's bad, it's just that it's kind of shallow and a lot of it is played for laughs, which undercuts any attempts at atmosphere building.
Where The Darkness II surpasses its predecessor is in the actual shooting. This has also been streamlined. You can still dual wield and you still have darkness powers, but everything feels much smoother and more responsive. The clunky controls and weird aiming of the original have been replaced by a set up and controls that feel very modern and smooth. You can even aim down sights should you want to, though dual wielding and using darkness powers is more fun. You still eat your enemies’ hearts for upgrade points, though this time there’s a tree where you select various passive and active abilities, and the first games’ execution system where you shot enemies up close has been tweaked so that enemies get stunned after a time now and you can pick them up with your darkness arms to either execute them for health or ammo bonuses or throw them at their buddies as projectiles. The vastly overpowered black hole ability has also been tweaked so that now once you unlock the ability the black holes randomly spawn on enemy bodies instead of hearts and you have to pick them up and throw them. This is a smart change that keeps the ability strong without allowing it to be abused.
With its impressive cell-shaded graphics, which hold up incredibly well, and strong, partially licensed, soundtrack the game could almost pass for a modern shooter, or at least a modern remake of an older game. I was playing it on a Series X through backward compatibility emulation and it looked, controlled, and ran fantastically well. The first game had a semi-RTS element in the ability to summon 4 different types of darklings and order them around, but the second game just has one, who is always with you and who you can interact with in a few ways. As a gameplay element it’s been streamlined to the point of not being very interesting, but the new darkling has its own personality and doubles as Jackie’s irascible sidekick and probably the game’s best character. You even control him directly for a few short stealth sequences, which are…okay.
The level design in the Darkness II is also a big step up from the first game. The Darkness I’s mix of open world areas and more linear levels worked fine, but in a game where much of the fun comes from using its unique mechanics like the ability to shoot out lights for a burst of darkness power and finding things to pick up and hurl at enemies, the open world areas made it feel like a generic shooter and even the unique areas seemed to be built more for atmosphere than with an eye towards gameplay. Places were interesting to explore, but didn’t necessarily lean in to what made the game fun when they became combat arenas. The second game was clearly designed with much more of an eye towards playability, and so you find a ton of junk to hurl at bad guys, lots of light sources to seek out and destroy (sometimes you can shoot the bulbs but often you have to find and disable the generator) and plenty of cover to use during shoot outs. It’s a corridor shooter for sure, but at least the corridors are fun to blast your way through.
No game is perfect, though, and the Darkness II features its share of flaws. Beyond being short and relatively simplistic it also suffers from having some enemies who are just a pain to fight. Since much of the gameplay focuses on the light/darkness mechanic it’s unsurprising that some of your enemies use spotlights and flash grenades to try and remove the advantage you have in the darkness. Unfortunately the game visualizes this by whiting out the screen, effectively blinding you. This makes it very hard to shoot accurately at your enemies, and also means that much of the time the game has significantly reduced visibility while you scramble around trying to get out of the light. This blinding mechanic isn’t a lot of fun. Enemies with shield are less frustrating, forcing you to strip their protection away before you kill them, which encourages you to use your Darkness arms actively in combat and not lean just on guns. There are probably too many of these shield guys, though, and fighting them over and over can get monotonous. In general the game could use more variety in enemies, which the first game had with a greater number of factions and different scenarios to face off against.
Overall The Darkness II feels like a less ambitious but higher budget sequel to the game that came before. As a game it is a much more polished experience and feels great to control and play through, but it sacrifices a lot of what stood out in the first game to accomplish this. The graphics and presentation hold up very well, the story isn’t quite as affecting as the first game’s and is more cartoonish and over the top, but it also gets rid of a lot of the rough edges in level and encounter design that make the first game feel old. In 2021 it’s a much more approachable but less memorable game.
It’s also significantly shorter, weighing in at about 5-6 hours for the campaign. There’s a side campaign that can be played in co-op with four unique characters with their own powers (mostly based on Jackie’s powers from the main game) and a basic story that runs parallel to and is referenced in the main game. In 2021 there’s obviously nobody randomly playing this online, but you can play it offline (despite these levels clearly being balanced for co-op) and it’s…fine. There’s much less story than the main campaign but there’s enough to make it a nice little bonus for people who want a bit more to do or just want to play the game in co-op for some reason. This was still during the period of obligatory multi-player shoehorned into every game, but at least this little side campaign is relatively inoffensive and adds something to pad out the length of a short game, even if you’re just playing single player.
Schlocktober rating: Acceptable Schlock.
The Darkness II in 2021 is a perfectly adequate game. It has plenty of strong horror elements, from shocking levels of violence to demonic creatures and some pretty creepy environments. It’s not very special or memorable, and $60 was a high asking price for a game like this, but it’s held up well as a fun little campaign with a few neat set pieces that you can blow through in a few evenings. It definitely checks all the boxes in terms of horror theming and makes for a nice, short October playthrough, though it is not scary in the least, unless your true fear is mandatory stealth sequences (and even then they're very short.) If you can get it cheap and you like horror themed FPS then I’d recommend checking it out. Not every game lets you kill enemies by hurling a sarcastic British demon monkey thing at them to bite their throats out, but more games probably should.
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