The Darkness combines fun gameplay, a compelling story, great visuals, and good voice acting to create a very good game.
Lets start with the story. The Darkness is based off a comic of the same name. The main character is named Jackie Estacado and hes a hitman that works for his Uncle Paulie's mafia ring. Everything is good with the two until Jackie's 21st birthday when Paulie decides to betray Jackie and attempts to get him killed. This obviously fails and this pisses off Jackie. He decides to go after his Uncle Paulie not only because he tried to kill him but also because Uncle Paulie is a complete a**hole who is turning on everybody and not following the "old ways" of the mafia family. To make things easier for Jackie the Darkness shows up, which is a demon that has been inside Jackie for his life and comes out on his 21st birthday. The darkness basically allows Jackie to kill people a lot faster and the more he kills, the stronger the darkness becomes. So its sort of a good thing, but really its not and you'll find out why when you play it. Overall, the story is very good though I wish it could have been longer.
Those who have played the Chronicles or Riddick will find The Darkness to be slightly similar in terms of how it plays. Though the gameplay isn't highly innovative it does have one thing that seperates it from other shooters. That obviously, is the Darkness itself. The Darkness has two long heads that come out of your back and sit out in front of you on either side. When you use the Darkness you are much stronger and can take more hits. When you kill an enemy you can eat their heart and this gives you darkness power. As your darkness power grows, you get new abilities. Their are 4 main abilities and they are the Creeping Dark, Demon Arm, Darkness Guns, and Black Hole. You can also summon darklings which will fight for you. Although you will also fight with guns, once you have all four darkness powers you will rarely use them as its much easier to kill a group of people with a black hole or with darkness guns. Of course, your darkness power will run out the more you use it so you must stay in the shadows to regain darkness power. Because of this, you will find yourself shooting out lights everywhere you go. Overall, the gameplay is solid.
The graphics in The Darkness look great. From the environments to character models everything about the game is done very well. The Darkness powers all look really good when you use them and the effects that they have on your enemies are exactly how they should be. From top to bottom, The Darkness looks amazing visually.
There is nothing like good voice acting and The Darkness has plenty of it. Every character you meet has a distinct personality to them and it makes you feel like you're really talking to a real person. The Darkness sounds very creepy and evil which it obviously should sound like. The sound effects are also superb and this really adds to the game. Overall, the sound really makes the game shine.
My only beef with this game is the multiplayer. It just isn't that fun. Like Gamespot said in its review, it feels tacked on. Its like Starbreeze just threw it in there so more people would buy it. If a sequel is ever made for this game, Starbreeze should either spend more time on the multiplayer or just throw it out completely and work soley on the single player.
In the end, The Darkness is a great game. The single player is the main reason for that. Anyone who is looking for a fun and intense first person shooter should check out The Darkness.