CoinReturn
25-Jun-2007, 06:51 PM
There are things about The Darkness that will have you gurning with frothing appreciation and leave you in no doubt that Starbreeze is among the most talented developers in the world. Its ability to consistently inject new life into a resolutely tired genre shouldn't be underestimated. Just as Starbreeze managed with The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, the pacing's exquisite in that the game twists and turns in new directions just when it's required.
The things that really mark The Darkness out are, we'll repeat, it's "minute-to-minute gameplay". You can't argue with that. It's a game which offers thrills arguably as intense as anything the genre has to offer. It is, for the most part, an extraordinarily entertaining game with precious little fat around the edges, complemented by a wonderfully engaging script, great (although sometimes cod amusing in the case of Mike Patton's attempt at voicing The Darkness with gravely malevolence) voice acting, and some of the best presentation you'll ever see in a first-person shooter.
It's not often we'll talk about 'game direction' in the way that a film reviewer might refer to a must-see movie, but this deserves to be held up as a great example of a game that got it spot-on. More often than not, you get the sense that Starbreeze's main aim was to keep its audience entertained and that everything else simply flowed from that central idea. Admittedly, it's a shame that the otherworld sections were a blight on the overall quality, but it's not enough to detract from how you'll feel about it.
In a year absolutely crammed with interesting-looking first-person shooters, you've got to come up with a game of extraordinary quality to rise above the competition. The Darkness has come along at simultaneously the best- and worst-possible time: on the one hand, it has arrived before it risked being drowned out in a fiercely competitive market, full of games claiming to be the Next Big Thing; on the other, it might well suffer from people holding off for what else is coming out. For what it's worth, I'd concur with Rob and suggest that any fan of first-person shooters needs to play this game, even though the occasional duff level disrupts the quality at times. Once The Darkness gets its tentacles around you, resistance is futile.
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=78377&page=1
The things that really mark The Darkness out are, we'll repeat, it's "minute-to-minute gameplay". You can't argue with that. It's a game which offers thrills arguably as intense as anything the genre has to offer. It is, for the most part, an extraordinarily entertaining game with precious little fat around the edges, complemented by a wonderfully engaging script, great (although sometimes cod amusing in the case of Mike Patton's attempt at voicing The Darkness with gravely malevolence) voice acting, and some of the best presentation you'll ever see in a first-person shooter.
It's not often we'll talk about 'game direction' in the way that a film reviewer might refer to a must-see movie, but this deserves to be held up as a great example of a game that got it spot-on. More often than not, you get the sense that Starbreeze's main aim was to keep its audience entertained and that everything else simply flowed from that central idea. Admittedly, it's a shame that the otherworld sections were a blight on the overall quality, but it's not enough to detract from how you'll feel about it.
In a year absolutely crammed with interesting-looking first-person shooters, you've got to come up with a game of extraordinary quality to rise above the competition. The Darkness has come along at simultaneously the best- and worst-possible time: on the one hand, it has arrived before it risked being drowned out in a fiercely competitive market, full of games claiming to be the Next Big Thing; on the other, it might well suffer from people holding off for what else is coming out. For what it's worth, I'd concur with Rob and suggest that any fan of first-person shooters needs to play this game, even though the occasional duff level disrupts the quality at times. Once The Darkness gets its tentacles around you, resistance is futile.
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=78377&page=1