After this, its true that Starbreeze is the only developer in the world who can carve quality games out of other media.
Story: - You play as your regular NYC mobster, Jackie. Who later finds that his clan has painted a red bull’s-eye on the back of his head, Jackie supposedly betrayed the mafia family at some point. Later in the game you will possess (or be possessed) by some…”unique” powers that’s not in your regular mobster inventory. With the Darkness engulfing every street of NYC, the mobsters on your hot trail, it’s only you and your demon-inside.
Game play: - The Darkness plays like your FPS…with addition of your “demon arms”. 2 Snake like heads popping out of your shoulder blades. They are operated by your shoulder buttons, one of me can bit the head off an enemy, and other can rip heart through the victim’s chest. You can also move of the arms like a snake crawling through vents, walls like a snake and sneak upon enemies. The arms are so strong that can you actually lift vehicles and throw them at bounch of poor souls and watch them squashed. You can also form small army of devilish creatures called Darkling’s which will your nasty work of killing your foes without moving a finger (or demon arms). The demon arms and Darkling powers only works when you are in the darkness and have a limited time for it, it regenerates fairly quickly when you are in a dark room. The physics system is really good and sometimes you might just end up roaming around and cause havoc with your arms. Yeah that’s right, although it’s not GTA IV by any margin; you can explore a good amount of NYC, which can be used to find side-missions, etc. Although the cream of action lies in the game’s main content. The only thing that seams weird to me is that, whenever you pull your demon arms…the common folk around the city and your enemies only startle a bit. I mean COMON!! It’s not everyday a guy pulls out 2 snake heads from his shoulder…or is it something I missed?
Multiplayer is an afterthought and is just added for the sake of having a multiplayer game. The developers themselves have said that the game is a single player focused game.
Graphics: When Riddick came for Xbox, it easily raised the bar of graphical quality for the console (and later PC), both technically and artistically. The Darkness continuous that tradition as well. The game is one of the few games that look really superb in this gen, without using the Unreal Engine 3. So full marks for Starbreeze on that. The textures are sharp, and character models are also really good, especially the main characters in the game, but overall all of them are good.
Sound: The sound is good and is in line with the graphical quality. The voice acting in the game is on the top. The sound of guns seams real and especially the queer voice of your inner-demon is nerve cracking to say the least.
Together with a great storyline, solid voice acting and lots of side-missions and fantastically awesome demon arms, this game has a lot of value.
Personally it’s a game for which I think my 60$ is well spent and is easily 360’s AAA game of the summer.