The Darkness Review, Continued

A focal point of the game takes place in the Fulton Street and Canal Street New York City subway stations. At first, I was thrilled since I used to work near Canal Street and took the train to and from the station everyday. Unfortunately, the Canal Street stop in the game looks like an artist created what he or she thought the subway stations look like without ever spending much time below Manhattan's streets. There is dirt and scum everywhere, but the layout does not accurately depict what the stations are like in real life.

Above ground, lower Manhattan is given a superficial brushwork, yet the water troughs, looming skyscrapers in the horizon and gritty streets at least remotely look like an authentic setting. There is something eerie about navigating The Darkness' gloomy avenues, buildings and underground passageways - not to mention the parallel world in chapters two and four. The streets are usually devoid of bystanders and are spookily quiet, until you meet up with the bad guys and the scene quickly erupts into a blood bath. The setting reminded me of the eerily-quiet streets in Martin Scorsese film "After Hours," when the main character is trapped all night in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and can't make his way to his uptown apartment.

When the characters speak, it is apparent that the developers' sought to capture the accent and colloquialisms of real Lower East Side, like a poor-man's voiceover of the characters in Scorsese's "Mean Streets," which offered a realistic and poignant depiction of Italian-American life with a mafia bent in the Lower East Side. The best I can say about Jackie (voiced by actor Kirk Acevedo), though, is that he sounds like a bad imitation of a younger Robert DeNiro in "Mean Streets." The voice of the Darkness, though, is pure, unadulterated evil; there is nothing to compare it against.

The Darkness offers a different kind of FPS experience, thanks to Jackie's supernatural powers.

A lot of the gameplay involves what is becoming a very tired element in FPS titles: finding stuff and going on missions to either kill or destroy someone or something. Your ultimate goal is to kill the Don himself, who has tried to murder Jackie and has done a very bad thing to Jackie's girlfriend, Jenny. But as the game unfolds, you learn more about Jackie, and here is where the storyline begins to develop.

One scene involves a visit to the orphanage where Jackie grew up, replete with flashbacks and ghost-like voices from the past. You get to know characters like his aunt, who discusses her vision of the Mafia honor code and why the Don violated the contract with his people. In one scene, you get to know Jackie's girlfriend better, which involves smooching with her on the couch in front of the TV - the action here, though, remains PG-rated.

Then there is the story behind The Darkness itself, and without giving away one of the more surreal and surprising scenes, you learn more about the dark secret after Jackie is catapulted in another time and place far, far away from New York. Without spoiling the ending, I've got to say that the final scene was downright sad for this reviewer (although the pathos could have been only subjective since the TV series "The Hulk" and the movie "Robocop," while hardly masterpieces, pulled at my heartstrings, too).

The Darkness' story is captivating - up to a certain point. Unfortunately, Jackie's character ultimately remains pastiched and one-dimensional. Sure, he is an orphan, is angry and has good reason to wack people. But his first-person monologues about his life between scenes are almost laughable satires of someone poking fun at how characters speak in bad mafia films. And as far as The Darkness goes, you never really learn how or if Jackie assumes control of it, which ultimately leaves you hanging.

The Darkness has some tedious missions and puzzles, including a strange subway sequence.

While the FPS gameplay is excellent, many of the game's missions are downright boring. They sometimes even involve hopping on the subway train to go back and forth between scenes, which is just plain tedious. Most of the missions involve any one of the non-combatant scumbag mafia characters you encounter who ask you to go somewhere - you often have to take the subway to a different station - and to wack someone or to retrieve something. One of the more boring side missions involves jumping down into the subway tracks and retrieving a lost bracelet for a sad-looking middle-aged woman.

One particularly irritating puzzle forces you to circle around a water pump in order to turn it on, which you must do to progress to the next level. It involves tedious trial and error until you stand at the exact right spot from where you can activate the pump. What is the point? No problem-solving skills are required, as it is just boring hit-or-miss movement. There are plenty of monotonous puzzles like this.

At their best, the graphics are intriguing in a comic book art sort of way, and downright murky at their worst, which is too often the case. One scene takes place in the vacated bowels of the New York subway system. Called the "Turkish Baths," the setting was obviously drawn up to resemble a spa of some sorts, which has been converted into a place for degenerate mobsters to do their dirty works of killing and torturing. But the scenes, unfortunately, are so murky that they bear only a slight resemblance to any sort of gym, public steam bath or anything else, really. In fact, "Turkish Baths" just felt like more of the same: a place to shoot yourself out of with the help of the Darkness' powers, while the bad guys shout "I've got clearance here" or "What the...?" for the umpteenth time.

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