Pros: Great visuals, good voice work and music, Darkness powers are innovative
Cons: Bad Map system, Story is disappointing, Stupid WW1 levels
The bottom line: The Darkness does have a unique gameplay style, but takes alot of short cuts as well
I was a huge fan of the Darkness comic before the game was even announced. Suddenly, my hopes were up when I saw the trailers for the first-person shooter action game. Left and right, positive reviews were flourishing throughout the gaming community. I have finally gotten my hands on it, and is it everything I hoped for and more?... Not really.

The story follows a mafia hitman named Jackie Estacado, who, for a seemingly unknown reason, is given the gift known as "The Darkness" on his twenty-first birthday. Just his luck however, his boss and Uncle Paulie, has put a hit on him due to Jackie's age long disagreements and complaints with his Uncles doings. The story obviously takes a short route for the game. It seems like the developers wanted to toss in any story they could just to skip to the action. Do they honestly expect me to believe that after dozens and dozens of comics that Uncle Paulie wakes up one morning and says "Jackie complains about everything, let's kill him?". Anyways, It goes without saying that your mission is to kill Paulie before he kills you.

It's not long into the game that you discover the mysterious possession. At first it's random, creepy voices, than it's fully unleashed. One thing I had a little trouble wrapping my head around was Jackie's reaction to the Darkness. There seemed to be no conflict at all, infact, he seems pretty fine about the whole ordeal of suddenly inheriting an evil curse. Nevertheless, the darkness powers are pretty underwhelming at first. Realistically, the only thing you can do is take control of one of the darklings attached to you and attack enemies with the same bite move. Apart from attacking enemies, they can also sneak through small spaces that are almost always invisible at first site to open doors or flick switches, the big problem with this is that there's no meter to show you how long you have, at random points the darkling with retract back to Jackie's body, going into the light will also speed up the process, they're also very hard to control, without a smooth surface to slither along, you may find yourself getting frustrated by the disobedient controls. Later in the game however, you get more powerful attacks by leveling up, which is done by devouring hearts from dead victims. The darkness powers are less effective when Jackie is exposed to the light. This meens alot of Sam Fisher-esque light shooting. Needless to say, this makes the environments very dark, and without playing with your lights off, it'll get hard to see where you're going. You can also summon various darklings such as the self-explanatory "kamikaze" who blow up objects leading to different pathways, and one's that open doors or provide more firepower.

The game isn't all non-stop running and gunning through pathways. You can travel for the most part whenever you want to different districts of New York via the plethora of subway stations. None of these districts really manage to make themselves look different from one another. They all feature the same gritty, graffiti plastered walls and houses. Not only this, but you can go inside very few buildings. The environments do look nice, but you can't appreciate them due to the fact that it's constantly dark and the bland buildings.

Objectives are often given to you by other people who tell you to venture somewhere and do something violent. My issue with the missions is that they're lacking any sort of detail. "Go to this street". Even worse is the very vague map, be prepared to travel around in circles many times. A mini-map would of been a nice touch.

The graphics are excellent. The facial animations are superb and the darkness effects are stunning. The environments again, can get repetitive and bland, but are nice at first site. The problem is, there aren't enough explosions or cut scenes to show them off.

Besides battling in New York, you're transported to various places during WW1 which explains the history of the Darkness possession. These levels are lackluster compared to the straightforward, real-world environment of New York. The environments are almost to big for their own good. You'll be following a path when suddenly it cuts off to a dead end. Overall, a cut-scene could of explained it for the most part, instead you get an out of place, oddball level.

Most of your time in the game is spent wielding guns and shooting people. Which is a shame because the Darkness seems almost tacked on. You have these giant menacing snake-like creatures hanging from you and yet you're using them to open doors, it almost makes me wonder why you have to level up to fully utilize their powers. All the pistols do relatively the same amount of damage and the auto-target system makes it easy to kill quickly. The shooting is very fun however, the animations are all fluent and the shootouts are just plain intense.

The music in the game is very well done. For the most part orchestral scores are raging when the violence ramps up. Not only this, but being the type of dark, moody game it is, there's a lot of heavy metal soundtrack. The voicework is also great.

The Darkness overall is a good action game for people who want to mindlessly shoot things, but in the end it seems like an "all style, no substance" type game. For fans looking for a deep story line and Darkness powers beyond your wildest dreams, you may be disappointed. The multiplayer seems lazily tossed in and a short single player campaign also aren't positive aspects of the game. But, the darkness does deliver great shootouts and the possession is noteworthy.