Pros: Some of the best console visuals to date, fantastic mafia-noir story with great characters.
Cons: Short single player, typical uninspired multiplayer, mixed shooting mechanics, loading...
The bottom line: Rent it.
Some characters are just born dark, or so suggests 2KGames' The Darkness. Not only are you wanted gunned down by the mafia, but you have a demon on your back that (literally) wants everyone dead. The one upside to your whole life is that you have an extremely metal looking haircut (Danzig'd be proud). It's a quaint setup for a game, and thanks to crisp visuals, amazing pacing and a generally grand and fun presentation, The Darkness feels like one of the biggest and darkest next-gen games to date.

The first thing to note about the darkness is the terrific voice acting and story. From the start it creates an immersion that does not feel far from the most bleak pulp comics like Sin City. You play mob man Jackie, who is celebrating his 21st birthday but looks and sounds oddly 10 or 15 years older. The streets of New York do that to people I guess.

A chain of events occurs and soon you find yourself hiding out in a cemetary bathroom with a homeless man and eel-like demons shooting out of your back. The Darkness, voiced by Mike Patton, plays out like the inner monologue of a serial killer. Throughout the game Jackie faces both the mob and The Darkness, with levels interspersed between New York and the depths of hell itself. It's a short story but a complex one, with a lot of likeable characters and magnificent voice acting. By the end the player is able to let the details sink in, and the unflinching, bleak nature of the story makes for something very compelling in videogame terms. It easily has the best story of any game I've played on the 360.

On the whole, the gameplay consists of shooting and activating darkness powers. As a shooter, The Darkness does not fare great. There is nothing broken about the game, but none of the guns have the grit or visceral firepower you might want them to have, not to mention there are few of them. The real highlight of the gameplay is darkness powers, which can be charged by destroying all light sources and enveloping the room or streets in darkness. When in full darkness, the room takes on an eerie orange silhouette (Fitting since orange is the color of death for the mob)

The powers themselves are all fun to use, including gruesomely using the darkness eels that sprout from the back to manually drive them up to enemies and bite their faces off. Later in the game you get a tentacle that allows you to hurl people, cars and anything else that's not nailed down effortlessly. You can also summon one of four different minions, but I found him a little too slow for the combat at hand. After you kill enemies you can use the tentacles to devour their hearts and increase your darkness powers, which is fairly gruesome, but they're cold-blooded mobsters so I guess karma evens it out.

This all works because the lighting is great, along with all the graphics. Having played both the 360 and PS3 versions, the PS3 seems to have the more gritty, realistic look of the two, with a slight dip in framerate, while the 360 version seems to run smoothly, albeit with less gritty realism. Certain areas, such as the subway you use to traverse new york, are simply beautiful. The character models have a distinct style that fits the mood, although their movements are a bit blocky. Regardless, you can take to every NPC (Even get a few sidequests in the frequently traversed subway), it's a lot of content even though it's squeezed thin in terms of gameplay length.

The game can be completed in about 7 or 8 hours, which isn't really surprising for a 360 game. Though it's short, there is a lot in the details and more than a little bit to behold. Aside from difficulty levels there isn't any replayibility aside from the prerequisite 360 achievements, which are pretty standard stuff. Really, the reason The Darkness fares so well compared to similar shooters is its dedication to creating those distinctly awesome moments.

Early in the game you sit in your girlfriend's apartment and are allowed the option to watch "To Kill A Mockingbird" in its entirety from on the couch through the tiny TV screen. Bizarre phone numbers scattered all over the game can be dialed from payphones to odd effects. You watch as your character gets a power drill inserted into his face. It's all quite wonderful and resembles the level of detail that could be found in an older PC shooter. The story never takes a backseat to the action, so this is in no way a corridor crawler. If anything, this makes the game feel more vibrant and cohesive, as there weren't any meaningless enemy rooms stuffed in to increase the gameplay time.

Unfortunately, the game also includes a very subpar multiplayer mode that has nothing to do with the single player game. It's a lagfest full of standard CTF matches, health items and the same dull weapons in the solo game. You can change into one of the darklings you could summon in the single player game for some reason, that's about it. It's the sort of addition that sort of taints the single player and I wish they would've just not included it at all.

In all though, the darkness is still a magnificent marriage of demons and mafioso. It's like seeing Marlon Brando at Hot Topic or something. I don't know what that means. But it's still stylistically beautiful and engaging from start to finish, and that's rare in any game.