I don’t play many FPSes. Not because of any particular dislike of the genre, or anything like that, more that… I think I’m just generally not predisposed to really go and check them out? I think mostly because my formative memories of gaming were with games often decried by the Call of Duty bros in my cohort as kiddie shit which I needed to grow up so I could play Real Games, and mostly due to most FPSes I heard of at the time being war shooters where the #1 selling point was usually ‘better graphics! it looks so good! by the way your computer won’t be able to run it and also even if you got a better one you won’t be able to run the next one we churn out in a year or so!’ that I was kinda turned off and kept playing the things I preferred to play.
Even today, I don’t really tend to stray into the genre much, even if I don’t exactly feel how I felt about the genre back then. Maybe I’m still subconsciously biased. Maybe it’s because most shooters today are still focused on multiplayer and I’m mostly a single-player kind of guy. Maybe it’s because I’m honestly kinda bad with shooter games — I’m too slow on the draw/too focused on getting a perfect shot in a genre that mostly encourages more fast-paced play, and I’m too tunnel-vision-y/head-empty to try and go for cover/do anything other than stand there and attempt to rush down people. There are FPSes I’ve tried, and liked, over the past few years, but as a whole, the genre is kind of a blind spot for me. I haven’t really played many of the must-play shooters, and as a whole… none of those that I’ve played have really been formative experiences or anything I’d place among my favourites.
Except for this one! This was something I picked up in one of the early Humble Bundles that I bought, and started playing… on my birthday, apparently, in 2014, and… kind of immediately I was captivated. Through the frenetic and at times absolutely brutal gunplay, the simultaneous power trip and achilles heel of your darkness power, a penchant for violence that actually sickened me at the time (which, from the perspective of nine years later: lol), and… enough little touches and moments that got me genuinely into the story. I never played the first game, or read the comics, nor did I particularly care to, but this game, in particular, was one that held into my memory long after I beat it, and was always in my mind as ‘hey I should replay this someday’ for a lonnnnngggggg time coming. I finally got the chance, in early 2023, and having replayed it again… and honestly? I think it still holds up.
You play as Jackie Esticato, the newly appointed don of the Esticato crime family, who has the dubious honour of being the current bearer to The Darkness — a primordial being that jumps from host to host, granting them great power at the cost of eventually driving them insane. Jackie has been able to suppress it for many years, but a hit both forces him to tap into The Darkness again and places him face to face against The Brotherhood, a mysterious cult who intend on taking The Darkness from Jackie and using it from their own ends. In the midst of it all, Jackie keeps getting visions of his past, and of his late flame Jenny, and it soon becomes a battle on multiple fronts: one against The Brotherhood for control of The Darkness, and one against The Darkness for control over himself.
The shooter gameplay, at its core, isn’t too different from what I’ve otherwise seen, though I appreciate the arcadey edge added to it — instead of holding the same guns all game and collecting ammo for them, you can only hold two guns at a time, and you’re encouraged to frequently switch with guns on the floor, often meaning that you never quite know what you’re going to have during the next encounter. What really diversifies gameplay, however, is the presence of The Darkness. Manifesting as two tentacles bursting out of your body, The Darkness immediately makes you a force to be reckoned with, and against the legions of gangsters and cultists fully justifies the ‘one man army’ approach most shooters tend to take with their protagonists. Slashes from your tentacles stun enemies and demolish whatever armour they might have, and if you grab an enemy while they're stunned, you get to pick and choose just how, exactly, you get to tear their body apart. You eat hearts to regain your health. You can grab parts of the environment, like pipes, or car doors, or fans, fling them right at enemies, and if your aim is right you just cut them in half — with bonus upgrade points given for killing people in special ways. These upgrade points (even if the tree itself looks fuckin’ ugly), amongst other things like different executions, then feed into and make your guns stronger: whether it just being straight upgrades, or powers like Swarm — which makes you barf locusts on your enemies from long range and making them unable to fire back — or gun channelling, which lets you temporarily boost your guns, increasing their power and allowing you to hit enemies through walls and armour. With the power of The Darkness, you can walk into a room full of gunmen and make mincemeat of them in a way that doesn’t even feel close, and this feeling of sheer power is an adrenaline rush, each enemy encounter a hit that asks the player how exactly they are going to fuck shit up — in the way that reinforces the idea the story presents of The Darkness as a well of power easy to become addicted to.
But it’s not always a stomp in your favour: specific encounters instead make your Darkness powers a liability instead of a godsend, and relying on them exclusively is a surefire way to get Jackie gunned down. Beyond the lack of range your tentacles have outside of objects you can pick up — functioning more as melee/the coup de grace while your guns pepper enemies from afar — the Darkness possesses one incredibly crippling weakness: light. In addition to just absolutely blinding you whenever you’re in it, you lose access to your darkness powers and your passive health regeneration, leaving you blind, vulnerable to whatever comes your way, and absolutely helpless against it. This makes positioning vitally important in each encounter — finding a place outside of the light where you can jump in and out of the action, looking out for lights and generators to take out so you can run in for the kill. The lights are also used in a way that forms a difficulty curve: early on, when you’re fighting other gangsters, most light is incidental, and oftentimes is easily shot out, but once the game progresses, and you start going up against the brotherhood, light is actively weaponized against you — enemies with giant spotlights, generator setups which bathe the room in light, and oftentimes your first step in these encounters is to figure out how to take out the lights so you can properly fight. There’s one late game area set in a carnival which is just chokepoint after chokepoint of you walking to a spot, hitting a wall, and you needing to use all the tools at your disposal to eventually wear it down — and another one where it’s flat out daylight and you’re in an open room with barely any cover and you just have to keep moving, dodging bullets and taking out enemies while having to avoid the bad spots on the floor. I like the light both as a way to ramp up the difficulty and as a way to reinforce story beats, and sell The Brotherhood as people who know The Darkness and know how to take it down, as opposed to the random gangsters who don’t know what they’re up against and only particularly have numbers on their side. In general I just… really love how The Darkness manages to shake up the gameplay — it would’ve been easy to just give you powers and let you just style on your enemies, but the drawbacks and considerations you increasingly have to grapple with just really manages to bring it to another level.
And even if I think it’s the story that maybe knocks the game down a little, I do appreciate a good deal of what it does. The dialogue draws from the best of its 90s comics influence, having a little bit of edge without drowning every line with it/making all the characters feel homogenous, and the voice acting does a lot to elevate the material (HE WAS THE FIRST MAN TO EVER NOT EXIST is a line that’ll stick in my head forever). There’s also… something I won’t spoil, that occurs throughout the game, and even if the impact was lost on me this second go around knowing where it all goes I respect what it’s trying to do and I respect it for at least making me question what’s going on. What really was a misfire are the hub sections, set in Jackie’s penthouse apartment. I like the important conversations there, but… the game really kind of grinds to a halt as you walk around and are encouraged to like 10 other unimportant background gangsters and there really isn’t much to do. I’ve seen other shooters do this sort of thing before, and better — mainly through lowering the size and adding things to do, like sidequests and optional challenges — but here… it’s too large and too long for what’s mostly people expositing things at you, and having to drudge through it between nearly every story beat got old kinda quickly.
And… that’s enough of a mark to maybe weigh it down and prevent it from being one of my absolute favourites, the game still left as much of an impact on me now as it did back then. From fast, frenetic, and at times brutal shooter gameplay, a core mechanic that cripples you as much as it makes you a force to be reckoned with, a story that does a good job taking risks even if it doesn’t work as well a second time to an artstyle tha- oh man I didn’t even mention how cool this game looks, I love the way the cel-shading makes the game look legitimately out of a comic book — this is still… probably my favourite shooter. Maybe one day I’ll play more of them. 9/10.
Even today, I don’t really tend to stray into the genre much, even if I don’t exactly feel how I felt about the genre back then. Maybe I’m still subconsciously biased. Maybe it’s because most shooters today are still focused on multiplayer and I’m mostly a single-player kind of guy. Maybe it’s because I’m honestly kinda bad with shooter games — I’m too slow on the draw/too focused on getting a perfect shot in a genre that mostly encourages more fast-paced play, and I’m too tunnel-vision-y/head-empty to try and go for cover/do anything other than stand there and attempt to rush down people. There are FPSes I’ve tried, and liked, over the past few years, but as a whole, the genre is kind of a blind spot for me. I haven’t really played many of the must-play shooters, and as a whole… none of those that I’ve played have really been formative experiences or anything I’d place among my favourites.
Except for this one! This was something I picked up in one of the early Humble Bundles that I bought, and started playing… on my birthday, apparently, in 2014, and… kind of immediately I was captivated. Through the frenetic and at times absolutely brutal gunplay, the simultaneous power trip and achilles heel of your darkness power, a penchant for violence that actually sickened me at the time (which, from the perspective of nine years later: lol), and… enough little touches and moments that got me genuinely into the story. I never played the first game, or read the comics, nor did I particularly care to, but this game, in particular, was one that held into my memory long after I beat it, and was always in my mind as ‘hey I should replay this someday’ for a lonnnnngggggg time coming. I finally got the chance, in early 2023, and having replayed it again… and honestly? I think it still holds up.
You play as Jackie Esticato, the newly appointed don of the Esticato crime family, who has the dubious honour of being the current bearer to The Darkness — a primordial being that jumps from host to host, granting them great power at the cost of eventually driving them insane. Jackie has been able to suppress it for many years, but a hit both forces him to tap into The Darkness again and places him face to face against The Brotherhood, a mysterious cult who intend on taking The Darkness from Jackie and using it from their own ends. In the midst of it all, Jackie keeps getting visions of his past, and of his late flame Jenny, and it soon becomes a battle on multiple fronts: one against The Brotherhood for control of The Darkness, and one against The Darkness for control over himself.
The shooter gameplay, at its core, isn’t too different from what I’ve otherwise seen, though I appreciate the arcadey edge added to it — instead of holding the same guns all game and collecting ammo for them, you can only hold two guns at a time, and you’re encouraged to frequently switch with guns on the floor, often meaning that you never quite know what you’re going to have during the next encounter. What really diversifies gameplay, however, is the presence of The Darkness. Manifesting as two tentacles bursting out of your body, The Darkness immediately makes you a force to be reckoned with, and against the legions of gangsters and cultists fully justifies the ‘one man army’ approach most shooters tend to take with their protagonists. Slashes from your tentacles stun enemies and demolish whatever armour they might have, and if you grab an enemy while they're stunned, you get to pick and choose just how, exactly, you get to tear their body apart. You eat hearts to regain your health. You can grab parts of the environment, like pipes, or car doors, or fans, fling them right at enemies, and if your aim is right you just cut them in half — with bonus upgrade points given for killing people in special ways. These upgrade points (even if the tree itself looks fuckin’ ugly), amongst other things like different executions, then feed into and make your guns stronger: whether it just being straight upgrades, or powers like Swarm — which makes you barf locusts on your enemies from long range and making them unable to fire back — or gun channelling, which lets you temporarily boost your guns, increasing their power and allowing you to hit enemies through walls and armour. With the power of The Darkness, you can walk into a room full of gunmen and make mincemeat of them in a way that doesn’t even feel close, and this feeling of sheer power is an adrenaline rush, each enemy encounter a hit that asks the player how exactly they are going to fuck shit up — in the way that reinforces the idea the story presents of The Darkness as a well of power easy to become addicted to.
But it’s not always a stomp in your favour: specific encounters instead make your Darkness powers a liability instead of a godsend, and relying on them exclusively is a surefire way to get Jackie gunned down. Beyond the lack of range your tentacles have outside of objects you can pick up — functioning more as melee/the coup de grace while your guns pepper enemies from afar — the Darkness possesses one incredibly crippling weakness: light. In addition to just absolutely blinding you whenever you’re in it, you lose access to your darkness powers and your passive health regeneration, leaving you blind, vulnerable to whatever comes your way, and absolutely helpless against it. This makes positioning vitally important in each encounter — finding a place outside of the light where you can jump in and out of the action, looking out for lights and generators to take out so you can run in for the kill. The lights are also used in a way that forms a difficulty curve: early on, when you’re fighting other gangsters, most light is incidental, and oftentimes is easily shot out, but once the game progresses, and you start going up against the brotherhood, light is actively weaponized against you — enemies with giant spotlights, generator setups which bathe the room in light, and oftentimes your first step in these encounters is to figure out how to take out the lights so you can properly fight. There’s one late game area set in a carnival which is just chokepoint after chokepoint of you walking to a spot, hitting a wall, and you needing to use all the tools at your disposal to eventually wear it down — and another one where it’s flat out daylight and you’re in an open room with barely any cover and you just have to keep moving, dodging bullets and taking out enemies while having to avoid the bad spots on the floor. I like the light both as a way to ramp up the difficulty and as a way to reinforce story beats, and sell The Brotherhood as people who know The Darkness and know how to take it down, as opposed to the random gangsters who don’t know what they’re up against and only particularly have numbers on their side. In general I just… really love how The Darkness manages to shake up the gameplay — it would’ve been easy to just give you powers and let you just style on your enemies, but the drawbacks and considerations you increasingly have to grapple with just really manages to bring it to another level.
And even if I think it’s the story that maybe knocks the game down a little, I do appreciate a good deal of what it does. The dialogue draws from the best of its 90s comics influence, having a little bit of edge without drowning every line with it/making all the characters feel homogenous, and the voice acting does a lot to elevate the material (HE WAS THE FIRST MAN TO EVER NOT EXIST is a line that’ll stick in my head forever). There’s also… something I won’t spoil, that occurs throughout the game, and even if the impact was lost on me this second go around knowing where it all goes I respect what it’s trying to do and I respect it for at least making me question what’s going on. What really was a misfire are the hub sections, set in Jackie’s penthouse apartment. I like the important conversations there, but… the game really kind of grinds to a halt as you walk around and are encouraged to like 10 other unimportant background gangsters and there really isn’t much to do. I’ve seen other shooters do this sort of thing before, and better — mainly through lowering the size and adding things to do, like sidequests and optional challenges — but here… it’s too large and too long for what’s mostly people expositing things at you, and having to drudge through it between nearly every story beat got old kinda quickly.
And… that’s enough of a mark to maybe weigh it down and prevent it from being one of my absolute favourites, the game still left as much of an impact on me now as it did back then. From fast, frenetic, and at times brutal shooter gameplay, a core mechanic that cripples you as much as it makes you a force to be reckoned with, a story that does a good job taking risks even if it doesn’t work as well a second time to an artstyle tha- oh man I didn’t even mention how cool this game looks, I love the way the cel-shading makes the game look legitimately out of a comic book — this is still… probably my favourite shooter. Maybe one day I’ll play more of them. 9/10.