Should you spend $60 on “The Darkness II”? Absolutely not.
Why? Is it horrible? No. Is it offensive? Eh, not really, and not deliberately.
The problem is that, pure and simple, this game is too mediocre and buggy to be worth your $60. Maybe your $20, because you’re not missing anything world-shaking here, but you should wait anyway, for the patches to come out and make this game playable.
Let’s start with the good, because there is good here. The basic control scheme, where you have your human hands shooting and your demon hands meleeing and grabbing, is well done and fun to apply. The first time you rip off a car door to use as a shield, you’re going to giggle. This is the only original mechanic, but the rest of the game doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel; you’ll run around vents, creatively dismember people for experience points to spend on new weapons, solve basic puzzles, the usual. Similarly, the game is linear, but it’s fairly well-paced…for as long as it lasts.
You’ll burn through this game in about six to eight hours, and can we just say, we’re tired of this crap in first person shooters? If you want $60 out of us, don’t give us $20 worth of entertainment and expect the multiplayer to make up for the rest. Give us an actual campaign, with actual length. The big competition, “Kingdoms of Amalur”, has 200 (!!!) hours of total gameplay, for crying out loud. You can scrape up twelve.
The multiplayer here is actually fun and can be done as a single player campaign if you really want to, but that doesn’t make up for the brevity of the actual game. It’s so short we were literally taken by surprise when we saw the credits roll.
Furthermore, if you want us to pay sixty dollars, for which we could get twenty comics, five movie tickets, three DVDs, or ten downloadable games, you shouldn’t have the frame-rate die during the game’s more intense moments. There’s an unacceptable amount of bugs; it’s 2012, enemies should not trip and fall through the floor. That’s a problem we should have left behind with Pogs and the Clinton Administration.
Bugs are forgivable when they reflect a game’s ambition. Sure, it’s ridiculous when you see flying old ladies in “Red Dead Redemption” or a giant knock you into the stratosphere in “Skyrim”, but those are minor and rarely game-breaking; Bethesda actually has a rule where they leave in the funny, non-game-breaking bugs. This just wants to be an FPS.
Finally, there’s the story. There is something very wrong if you expect the player to feel bad for a character who’s basically a complete scumbag. Oh, the love of his life died. BOO HOO! HE’S A MOB BOSS! I just told this guy to rip a man’s tongue out through his butt, and he did it! It kind of ruins the fun that we’re supposed to view a vicious killer as a sad emo boy because something bad happened to him. Nope, he’s still a monster, even without that whole “demon” thing.
In short, there isn’t enough ambition and quality here to make this worth your cash. Wait until it hits the bargain bin, if you’re looking for an FPS.
image courtesy 2K