Review: Darkest of Days

Platform: Xbox 360

Developer: 8monkey Labs

Publisher: Valcon Games

# of Players: 1

Rating: M (Mature)

Official Site

Score: B

If you can overlook its technical issues, there's a lot of fun to be had in Phantom EFX's shooter, Darkest of Days. For their first major console and PC release, developer 8monkey Labs has cooked up a supremely cool entry in the extremely crowded FPS genre that focuses on a solid single player story-driven experience rather than hanging its reputation on the usual multiplayer shenanigans many gamers come to expect. The shooting action using a combination of historical and tricked out futuristic guns is indeed thrilling during the massive battles you're dropped into during the game. Granted, some hardcore FPS fans will pick the game apart for its flaws and fail to enjoy the experience for its good points. For the rest of us, following the compelling story as it plays out turns out to be the really surprising thing, even outstripping the action at some points.

The story starts out with a bang as your character (a guy named Alexander Morris) gets himself yanked from certain death at the Battle of Little Big Horn by a "Time Agent" and taken into the future. Here, you find out that a company called Kronotek has found a way to send people backwards in time with the ability to yank them back into their lab with no physical harm. Kronotek needs you to do them a big favor by heading out to some of history's bloodiest battles to track down and protect certain individuals or help rescue others pulled into these time periods. There are a lot more twists and turns to the story, and it's here where the game pulls you in from level to level as you uncover the real reason you've been "drafted." Still, new job responsibilities aside, you certainly won't miss dying with poor General George Armstrong Custer that's for sure. That gig you now have as time-tripping travel guide with guns initially seems like a welcome relief.

For those who want to just jump in and start blasting, the game dropkicks a little bit of your "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" plans right from the first mission. Certain "enemies" will be highlighted with blue auras and need to be taken down with arm or leg wounds or by throwing a handful of special pellets at them and detonating them with the press of a trigger button. This will knock them out of action so that Kronotek can drop in later to bring them back to their own time periods. It's certainly one way to keep the trigger-happy from merely mowing down all they see, as doing so will eventually put Time Agents on your behind with the same shoot to kill attitude. Nice. Special characters get a red aura and need to be protected, followed or escorted to safety. These guys will hold their own weight for the most part, firing on enemies or joining ranks on occasion and yup, they can be killed if you decide to not pay attention to protecting them.

As you travel through history, you'll be given accurate firearms from each period (well, with the exception of the Pompeii maps where you're pretty much a total bad-ass from beyond against the Roman legions) and occasionally have access to modern or futuristic guns. Going from a single shot Union rifle to blasting away a few waves of Confederate troops with a tricked out machine gun is exhilarating and fortunately, the game provides its share of great shooting sessions. As you go back and forth between battles and the Kronotek base, you'll start to see a few things that don't quite fit the story they've given you. How did they end up snatching you through time? Who the hell is this Dexter guy that keeps dropping F-bombs and making 20th century cultural references? Why the heck didn't Kronotek invent some sort of bullet-proof suit so you can't be shot to pieces in some of the tougher missions?

Well, that last question is more of a joke by yours truly, but the game can indeed be brutal if you try and play the one man army all the time. By dropping you into different eras without the luxuries of most other futuristic (or hell, some modern) shooters, you really need to pay attention to every detail. For example, you'll find yourself scouting out your first Civil War location in near total darkness with only moonlight, campfires and smoke from enemy guns to guide you. There are no health kits spinning in midair, you can only carry two weapons and instead of a fancy futuristic HUD, you get a "paper" map that you need to whip out in order to reorient yourself as well as check out enemy positions. Obviously, the boys at Kronotek wisely figured out that slapping you into some gear that was out of place would blow your cover and this actually makes for some intense moments when you wander too close to an enemy position. The only concession that maps makes to future tech is the fact that you can zoom in to see where you need to go as well as friendly and enemy positions.

The game plays close attention to some of the battles it throws you into, so at Antietam, expect to shoot and reload your Springfield after firing, making sure to change your position lest you take a few bullets to the face in return. You can grab a dead enemy's weapon if you like and this indeed comes in handy when you need a longer range scoped rifle at one point. To keep things even more tense, there's a mini-game during reloads that has you trying to click the trigger at a certain point to get a faster reload. While you don't need to do this, those few additional seconds can spell the difference between life and death on the more crowded maps. As for those future weapons, they're all limited use ordinance as you can't reload on a historical battlefield. So that combat shotgun, missile launcher, souped-up machine gun and other cool toys need to be used sparingly for the most part.

Between missions (and based on whether or not you blasted any blue-aura guys), you're given a few upgrade points that allow you to beef up your guns with faster firing or reloading, larger clips and more. These changes take effect when you dive into the next stage and can really make a difference when you need to dispatch enemies in short order. There are only a handful of achievements in the game and two come from upgrading your pistol and rifle to their maximums. Other achievements range from simple (completing certain eras) to strange, such as punching and killing a horse (it can be done!) or dying by drowning or blowing yourself up. You'd think that any game that encourages this sort of behavior would have a "save anywhere" system... but that's not the case here. You DO however, get a frequent auto save feature that's smart and never puts you too far back should you buy the farm.

Visually, the game looks good enough, although there are a few graphics issues such as lower resolution textures on big boulders, pop-up and drifting stalks in the Antietam cornfield, screen tearing at Kronotek HQ and the occasional frame rate stutter that distract from the experience. If you're an art student, you might notice there's an almost painterly look to the game that really brings the sections set in the past to life. I had a bigger issue with some of the pesky invisible walls spread over that lovely terrain. Yes, they'll keep you from falling off high places, but in some maps, you start to feel too constricted in all that beautiful open space. If you stack what's here up against other games on the 360, the game seems closer to a launch window title. However, for a proprietary engine and a game that took about three years to create, 8monkey's Marmoset does wonders with hundreds of enemies and allies on screen simultaneously.

Granted, some of your allies (I'm talking to YOU, Dexter!) aren't much help unless they're dealing death from machine guns and cannons or doing other kill-happy stuff on their own. Enemies, however, will take cover behind objects, rush up and whack you with a gun butt or stab away with bayonets. There are so many men coming at you in some maps that you can shoot in the general direction of a crowd and drop a few soldiers as fast as you can reload. Of course, you'll take some hits as well, especially when you find yourself flanked and being shot in a few vital organs by half a dozen angry troops. If you've never read up on Civil War battles, the insane beginning to the Antietam battle map will give you a tiny idea of how the body count was so huge. You're automatically guided with other Union troops to neatly line up and shoot it out with hundreds of Confederate troops on the other side of a ravine. From about 30 or so feet away, it looks like. It's a brief, disturbing and mind boggling bit of history that shows how past military tactics often led to what amounted to a two-sided turkey shoot.

Sound design, music and effects are well done and commendable throughout. The game really doesn't look or sound like a bombastic Hollywood action movie or a game emulating one, which is a good thing. I loved the snooty accent of the Kronotek head, Dexter's frequent cursing, occasional bad jokes and humorously "handy" tips on what to do with the guns he gives you as well as the other voices are all well acted. Sometimes you'll hear soldiers on the battlefield repeat themselves, but this isn't a big deal. The fact that German soldiers speak German, Russians speak Russian and so forth and so on really helps in adding to the immersion factor.

As for that lack of multiplayer, I didn't miss it at all. Anyway, I'm sure if enough fans beat their doors down via e-mail or message board posts, it's possibly something 8monkey could explore for a sequel... should the game do well enough at retail. However, given the fate of other time-travel or time based games that have hit the market over the past few years (well, other than the first two Timesplitters games), it's actually a welcome relief that gamers aren't saddled with yet another online game that'll be played over Xbox Live for a few days or so until the next few bigger games knock it off the charts completely. The main campaign is pretty lengthy, but replay value depends on if you want to go back and explore new strategies on certain maps or try and screw things up enough to see what happens. As one of those crazy video game collectors, I'll personally be hanging onto my copy of the game for historical purposes of my own. Like any good game, it'll be cool to whip this one out and say "I remember this..." before hopping in for another go.

Warts and all, what this game has in droves is heart. You might not like all the bumps in the road, that's for sure. However, the ride is so worth all the bruises you'll get by the end. 8monkey came up with a wickedly cool, serious story with twists galore and the combined use of time travel, historical battlefields and different weapons is genius cubed. Some of the technical flaws in the 360 version don't show up in the PC demo I played a few weeks back, so one could only guess how much better the 360 version would run if the team had more time to fully optimize their baby for the console. As noted above, the more unforgiving graphics whores will blast the game for its performance problems while failing to see the big picture. Personally, I loved nearly every minute of Darkest of Days and hope both developer and publisher continue to do more with this shooter in the future. They'd better and fast, before some other publisher decides to swipe the best parts of this one and tack it onto a more "popular" FPS franchise that appeals to a more jaded gaming audience used to getting the usual modes and match types.