Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/darkwatch-2005-review/
When I think of the PlayStation 2, First Person Shooters aren’t the first thing that comes to mind, but despite that, the system did have it’s fair share of really decent FPS games. One of those First Person Shooter’s is Darkwatch, a game developed by Blue Moon Studios (formerly Sammy Studios), and weirdly enough, published by Capcom of all companies in 2005 for the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox.
The game starts with Jericho Cross, an outlaw gunfighter in the late 19th-century American Frontier, doing one last job by robbing a train. Unbeknownst to him, the train belongs to the Darkwatch, an ancient organization committed to destroying supernatural evils. The train is not carrying gold or money, but a vampire lord that he accidentally releases named Lazarus Malkoth, resulting in Jericho getting bitten in the process, slowing turning into a vampire for the rest of the game.
Soon, Jericho is conscripted into the Darkwatch despite the uneasiness of the fellow elite operatives having a vampire join their ranks, and he has to defeat Malkoth with the help of his fellow Darkwatch agent Cassidy Sharp, who was murdered shortly after meeting Jericho, and now guides him as a spiritual voice. From there on, it’s pretty much what you’d expect.
The game has a moral system, or at least tries to have one. Throughout the game, you’re often given a choice to save someone in two different ways. The first are hidden damned souls located around every level, and you can choose to either to damn their soul to eternal torment or save their soul from suffering. The other type of moral choice is several times throughout the game, you’re given the choice to save someone from dying or turning into a zombie or ghoul, or turn them yourself. It doesn’t really add up to much. The only appeal of the moral system is that the choices lead to power ups, with both evil and good having their own exclusive powers, all of which you can use for a short period of time when a meter is fully charged. The only real choice that matters is towards the end of the game, and it’s a pretty obvious one.
Good powers include the “Silver Bullet”, which increases damage from firing your guns, “Fear”, causing enemies to run off, “Mystic Armor”, which adds an extra layer to your shields, and “Vindicator”, which causes all enemies in the vicinity to be struck with lightening. Bad powers include “Blood Frenzy”, causing your melee powers to increase their damage, “Turn”, which makes your enemies slaves, “Black Shroud”, causing enemies damage whenever they hit you, and “Soul Stealer”, which sucks out your enemies souls from a distance.
Playing through the game, it was pretty obvious that this was one of the first games that was clearly influenced by the first two Halo games that had come out at that point with a few of their design choices. Your character has a Blood Shield that regenerates when you hide behind cover, just like the shield from Halo. There are also Blood Canteens located around levels that act like Health Packs. But these are few and far between, since getting your health back is mostly done through picking up an enemies energy when they die. The energy you pick up from enemies can also be used to power up the energy bar for your special abilities.
The most annoying enemies are the ones holding barrels of TNT that can sneak up on you every now and again and kill you. At least with something like the Headless Kamikaze enemies in the Serious Sam franchise are screaming at the top of their lungs while running at you, making them easy to spot.
If you ever get a little lost, there is a handy feature called “Blood Vision”, that when you click in the right analog stick, your vision changes to red, and enemies, weapons, and other key elements to glow white, all while zooming in a bit so it makes those things easier to spot.
Thankfully the shooting sections are often broken up by a few other types of gameplay. A couple of times you ride a horse throughout the desert. You’re not really riding a horse through an area so much as you’re just shooting enemies as you’re either getting to your destination or catching up to a train in one of those sections. There is also a turret sections. It’s just OK, which is the best you could hope for with a turret section.
At a certain point in the game, you get to choose which mission you’d like to do next out of a list of missions, which is pointless, since you have to do all of them anyway. Maybe there was a section initially planned where you could walk around the Darkwatch base but it was cut out, but who knows. It also doesn’t let you know that much outside of a brief description of what to do, so picking a weapon for said mission is made more difficult, and you have to guess what to use if you’ve never played the mission before.
There is even a small driving section of the game, and it’s features the smoothest gameplay out of the whole game. The vehicle, named the Darkwatch Coyote (“coincidentally” named like an animal, like Halo’s warthog), also comes with a turret that you use to shoot nearby enemies, or you can run them over if you get bored. It’s a shame that it’s only one part of the game.
The game still looks pretty good for a PlayStation 2 and Xbox game. Nothing amazing, but the games artstyle has a really nice aesthetic, combining horror, western, and steampunk, on top the whole game generally looking pretty decent, especially the weapons.
Checkpoints are plentiful throughout the game, so when you die, you’re never sent back too far. And when you die, you don’t have to reload the entire level. The game thankfully just drops you back to the last checkpoint, which makes the game flow much better.
Probably the biggest downside of this game are the controls. The controls have those stiff feeling controls that a lot of PS2 and Xbox games had. It’s not awful, but I can see it turning a lot of people away who are more used to more modern gaming sensibilities. Despite that, all of the guns sound powerful and feel good to use.
You can also shoot off parts of an enemy, including their arms and heads, adding another satisfying layer to the shooting, as well as giving some indication that you’re damaging your enemies. There is also dynamite and a PlayStation 2 exclusive Splitter Grenade that explodes on impact, both sending enemies flying with ragdoll physics.
There are some unlockables that allow for some replayability. The best unlockable is the Gunslinger Mod, in which you can go back and play any of the chapters of the story mode that you’ve unlocked and play as either good or evil Jericho, and try to get high scores, such as the amount of enemies killed and weapon percentage accuracy. Getting good scores will unlock other things such as movies and concept art.
Like a lot of First Person Shooters of the time, Darkwatch came with a multiplayer component. It comes with some standard stuff, like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but it does have a somewhat unique mode called “Soul Hunter” in which you fight to collect Blood Clouds and be the first to to fill your Blood Bar, and “Team Soul Hunter”, which is similar, but you have to fill your teams Blood Bar.
Weirdly enough, each version of the game has a few differences. The Xbox version let you play the game over Xbox live. Unfortunately, the PlayStation 2 version is a bit more limited, only letting you play splitscreen or co-op mode. This was probably because the multiplayer component of the PlayStation 2 was an optional part of the console where as the multiplayer of the Xbox version was already integrated into the console, and was probably easier to develop for.
Back when the game was being released, it had a pretty big promotional campaign and was planned to be the first installment of a new media franchise, but unfortunately its sequel got canceled in 2007, the only thing left is a phone recording of a brief concept trailer, and the planned film adaptation never got released. Which is a shame, because another game on a more modern system could have been neat to see.
I wish that Darkwatch could get a re-release on modern consoles and PC. It’s a really solid First Person Shooter stuck under a few limitations as a result of the time it was released, and smoothing out some of those issues, such as the controls and the multiplayer not being around any more, could really help this game.
When I think of the PlayStation 2, First Person Shooters aren’t the first thing that comes to mind, but despite that, the system did have it’s fair share of really decent FPS games. One of those First Person Shooter’s is Darkwatch, a game developed by Blue Moon Studios (formerly Sammy Studios), and weirdly enough, published by Capcom of all companies in 2005 for the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox.
The game starts with Jericho Cross, an outlaw gunfighter in the late 19th-century American Frontier, doing one last job by robbing a train. Unbeknownst to him, the train belongs to the Darkwatch, an ancient organization committed to destroying supernatural evils. The train is not carrying gold or money, but a vampire lord that he accidentally releases named Lazarus Malkoth, resulting in Jericho getting bitten in the process, slowing turning into a vampire for the rest of the game.
Soon, Jericho is conscripted into the Darkwatch despite the uneasiness of the fellow elite operatives having a vampire join their ranks, and he has to defeat Malkoth with the help of his fellow Darkwatch agent Cassidy Sharp, who was murdered shortly after meeting Jericho, and now guides him as a spiritual voice. From there on, it’s pretty much what you’d expect.
The game has a moral system, or at least tries to have one. Throughout the game, you’re often given a choice to save someone in two different ways. The first are hidden damned souls located around every level, and you can choose to either to damn their soul to eternal torment or save their soul from suffering. The other type of moral choice is several times throughout the game, you’re given the choice to save someone from dying or turning into a zombie or ghoul, or turn them yourself. It doesn’t really add up to much. The only appeal of the moral system is that the choices lead to power ups, with both evil and good having their own exclusive powers, all of which you can use for a short period of time when a meter is fully charged. The only real choice that matters is towards the end of the game, and it’s a pretty obvious one.
Good powers include the “Silver Bullet”, which increases damage from firing your guns, “Fear”, causing enemies to run off, “Mystic Armor”, which adds an extra layer to your shields, and “Vindicator”, which causes all enemies in the vicinity to be struck with lightening. Bad powers include “Blood Frenzy”, causing your melee powers to increase their damage, “Turn”, which makes your enemies slaves, “Black Shroud”, causing enemies damage whenever they hit you, and “Soul Stealer”, which sucks out your enemies souls from a distance.
Playing through the game, it was pretty obvious that this was one of the first games that was clearly influenced by the first two Halo games that had come out at that point with a few of their design choices. Your character has a Blood Shield that regenerates when you hide behind cover, just like the shield from Halo. There are also Blood Canteens located around levels that act like Health Packs. But these are few and far between, since getting your health back is mostly done through picking up an enemies energy when they die. The energy you pick up from enemies can also be used to power up the energy bar for your special abilities.
The most annoying enemies are the ones holding barrels of TNT that can sneak up on you every now and again and kill you. At least with something like the Headless Kamikaze enemies in the Serious Sam franchise are screaming at the top of their lungs while running at you, making them easy to spot.
If you ever get a little lost, there is a handy feature called “Blood Vision”, that when you click in the right analog stick, your vision changes to red, and enemies, weapons, and other key elements to glow white, all while zooming in a bit so it makes those things easier to spot.
Thankfully the shooting sections are often broken up by a few other types of gameplay. A couple of times you ride a horse throughout the desert. You’re not really riding a horse through an area so much as you’re just shooting enemies as you’re either getting to your destination or catching up to a train in one of those sections. There is also a turret sections. It’s just OK, which is the best you could hope for with a turret section.
At a certain point in the game, you get to choose which mission you’d like to do next out of a list of missions, which is pointless, since you have to do all of them anyway. Maybe there was a section initially planned where you could walk around the Darkwatch base but it was cut out, but who knows. It also doesn’t let you know that much outside of a brief description of what to do, so picking a weapon for said mission is made more difficult, and you have to guess what to use if you’ve never played the mission before.
There is even a small driving section of the game, and it’s features the smoothest gameplay out of the whole game. The vehicle, named the Darkwatch Coyote (“coincidentally” named like an animal, like Halo’s warthog), also comes with a turret that you use to shoot nearby enemies, or you can run them over if you get bored. It’s a shame that it’s only one part of the game.
The game still looks pretty good for a PlayStation 2 and Xbox game. Nothing amazing, but the games artstyle has a really nice aesthetic, combining horror, western, and steampunk, on top the whole game generally looking pretty decent, especially the weapons.
Checkpoints are plentiful throughout the game, so when you die, you’re never sent back too far. And when you die, you don’t have to reload the entire level. The game thankfully just drops you back to the last checkpoint, which makes the game flow much better.
Probably the biggest downside of this game are the controls. The controls have those stiff feeling controls that a lot of PS2 and Xbox games had. It’s not awful, but I can see it turning a lot of people away who are more used to more modern gaming sensibilities. Despite that, all of the guns sound powerful and feel good to use.
You can also shoot off parts of an enemy, including their arms and heads, adding another satisfying layer to the shooting, as well as giving some indication that you’re damaging your enemies. There is also dynamite and a PlayStation 2 exclusive Splitter Grenade that explodes on impact, both sending enemies flying with ragdoll physics.
There are some unlockables that allow for some replayability. The best unlockable is the Gunslinger Mod, in which you can go back and play any of the chapters of the story mode that you’ve unlocked and play as either good or evil Jericho, and try to get high scores, such as the amount of enemies killed and weapon percentage accuracy. Getting good scores will unlock other things such as movies and concept art.
Like a lot of First Person Shooters of the time, Darkwatch came with a multiplayer component. It comes with some standard stuff, like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but it does have a somewhat unique mode called “Soul Hunter” in which you fight to collect Blood Clouds and be the first to to fill your Blood Bar, and “Team Soul Hunter”, which is similar, but you have to fill your teams Blood Bar.
Weirdly enough, each version of the game has a few differences. The Xbox version let you play the game over Xbox live. Unfortunately, the PlayStation 2 version is a bit more limited, only letting you play splitscreen or co-op mode. This was probably because the multiplayer component of the PlayStation 2 was an optional part of the console where as the multiplayer of the Xbox version was already integrated into the console, and was probably easier to develop for.
Back when the game was being released, it had a pretty big promotional campaign and was planned to be the first installment of a new media franchise, but unfortunately its sequel got canceled in 2007, the only thing left is a phone recording of a brief concept trailer, and the planned film adaptation never got released. Which is a shame, because another game on a more modern system could have been neat to see.
I wish that Darkwatch could get a re-release on modern consoles and PC. It’s a really solid First Person Shooter stuck under a few limitations as a result of the time it was released, and smoothing out some of those issues, such as the controls and the multiplayer not being around any more, could really help this game.