Music, Style & Culture

The Darkness II (Xbox 360)

Under all the shooting and slicing, there's definitely a beating heart.

The return of comic-book anti-hero Jackie Estacado has been a long time coming and it seemed, for a while, he'd been left in the dark (see what we almost did there – a joke). Thankfully, 2K Games have summoned the macabre tale back to our consoles with The Darkness II, set a few years after the original game's downbeat epilogue, where *SPOILER ALERT* he was forced to watch the death of his girlfriend, Jenny.

Jackie Estacado is now the boss of a Mafia firm and is keeping the Darkness inside him at bay. But what is The Darkness? Well, on Jackie's 21st birthday, a terrifying power erupted inside his body that saw two demonic tentacles sprout from his body allowing him to maim, torture and kill folk independent from his own two arms. A great asset for his line of work, but not so good for the lining of his jackets. The Darkness feeds off human hearts and gives Jackie supernatural abilities all the while sounding eerily like Mike Patton from Faith No More. So, all's going pretty well for Jackie until his firm is ambushed by a sect called The Brotherhood who want to extract the Darkness from his body like a desirable appendix. Suddenly, the demonic arms Jackie's kept at bay make a comeback and, frankly, there will be blood.



2007's The Darkness was an underrated gem of a game that melded first-person shooter action with the illusion of choice in a faux-open-world city environment. The Darkness II hasn't exactly stuck with the formula, resulting in a mixed-bag of a game.

The waggling arms of the Darkness are, thankfully, a lot easier to control this time round. The new 'quad-wielding' ability means you can control the Darkness arms with the left and right bumpers and your dual guns with the triggers. Each Darkness arm has its own unique powers – grabs and throws handled with the left arm, with slicing and dicing being controlled by the right. More environment interactivity means being able to rip off car doors with the Darkness to use as a shield, or Frisbee at an enemy's neck, slicing them in the jugular.

There's a stronger push on the Darkness' weakness in the sequel. With your enemies employing the use of light to try and stop you in your chaotic, maverick path towards destroying the Brotherhood, you'll often find the Darkness arms retreating inside you as you're engulfed in the bright stuff, having to shoot out bulbs and torch-wielding baddies to continue. Although, there's no real tricky strategy to the whole thing – it's almost always a case of destroying the light source with careless force.



The brutal gore of the game is beautifully done. It is, really. Moving away from the more realistic look of its predecessor, The Darkness II has a more comic-book feel, underlining the colourfully gory mangling of human bodies to follow.

And there are plenty of ways to do away with the waves of enemy bastards, with assignable executions that trigger animations to rip apart their bodies in as many ways as you can possibly imagine. Each heartless murder gains you Dark Essence that you can swap for 'talents' to upgrade Jackie's skills, including conjuring a black hole to suck enemies into and extra executions that will replenish ammo and health.

Unfortunately, the executions and the constant murder all become very tiring and fast. While its dark and sinister premise is enjoyably grotesque, the executions become repetitive quite early on; having to watch the same, long animations time after time can fast become a bore, quickly desensitising you to the initial shock and awe of it all. Gone is the side-questing, too - The Darkness II is a straight-up FPS. And a very linear one at that. Playing through Jackie's tale is an invariable straight line and, although there are some choices to be made, there's very little in the way of actual thinking involved here. Sadly, it's then a lot easier to ignore the story and skip the cinematics in favour of just blasting your way through.



Where The Darkness II does good is in its touchingly tender story. The Darkness causes Jackie to hallucinate, allowing him to see his *SPOIL...oh, forget it* dead girlfriend Jenny; the comfort he gets from seeing her is melodramatically executed, sure, but nevertheless quite heart-wrenching for a character seemingly so hell-bent on destruction. The fact that Jackie's main concern is that he'll lose Jenny again if the Brotherhood strip the Darkness from him is at odds with the game's deliciously gonzo approach to everything else. Coupled with odd and bewildering playable scenes in a mental asylum in which we must question whether Jackie's life with the Darkness is real, or if he's simply a madman locked away in a loony bin imagining it all, there's a hidden depth to the story that's, sadly, simple to avoid.

Annoyingly, the story campaign is incredibly short, leaving you with that rarely desired sense of 'What? Is that it?' and no real desire to play it again. Regardless, there's a New Game+ mode that'll help the score-hunters max out the talent tree and find all the hidden relics that don't really make much of a difference.



There's also an odd co-op multiplayer mode in which players take over frighteningly stereotypical characters who each have a Darkness power of their own. These are a fun distraction for a while and slot in with the main story, but there's even very little replayability to this.

Ultimately, The Darkness 2 is a curious thing – with more emphasis on story than most of the FPS games around at the moment, there's something almost retro about it that makes it seem fresh! Let down by its inability to step off its own rails for a second, the gung-ho shoot 'em all approach skewers its attempts at choice, interactivity and depth in the neck. But, this is a game that's definitely worth your time. Only when you have a moment to step back from the action – like in the loony bin – does it feel like you're getting to know Jackie. And these fleeting moments really amplify the tender feeling of loss and hurt that's often shrouded by the shrieking linear chaos of the rest of the game. Under all that shooting, slicing and executing, there's definitely a beating heart. Which, by the way, you can eat to restore your health.

The Darkness II is available now for Xbox 360 and PS3.

Rating: 7/10