It’s been a frustrating 2007 for PS3, without question. We all enjoyed the launch period at Play because we unanimously agreed that there was at least one above-average title for everyone. Be it MotorStorm, Resistance or Virtua Tennis 3, everyone had the opportunity to enjoy the console, and in the context of previous PlayStation launches it could easily be deemed the best ever. Since then, though? Nada. Oblivion, then, but since that title is a 360 port, we’ll stick with our ‘nada‘ answer.

The Darkness, however, fills that frustrating post-launch void with more substance than an oiled sponge cake. While we’ve kept the game on our radar for some time now, we weren’t always certain of how it would turn out, especially given the uninspired nature of PS3 FPS games so far. How wrong it would be, though, to assume that The Darkness would disappoint as Resistance did: this, unlike many of the PS3 titles we’ve had foisted upon us since launch, is one that finally makes use of its next-generation hardware. That doesn’t mean The Darkness is a free-roaming, gigantic monolith of an FPS in which you take tanks across a weird haloshaped thing, but is instead a unique shooter that uses the hardware in a new way.

First of all, you’ll notice that Starbreeze is trying to tell a story, and that it also does a pretty good job of it. Loads of games try and fail when it comes to story (Halo 2?), but only a select few pull it off in an acceptableto- everyone, general way. The Darkness almost perfects it with a gritty tale of the coming of age merging with the oddest and most disturbing gangster plot this side of Godfather III. Luckily, it’s disturbing in a more appropriate fashion.

Still, when we say “pretty good job”, you’ll know that we’re not completely enamoured by the story. The plot itself starts and ends very well, and the twists here are easily the best ever seen in a videogame. Some of the expressions in the cut-scenes are perfect, and the only thing that limits the experience is the occasional lip-syncing issue with, ironically, the main character, Jackie Estacado. While the style of voice acting in this game is absolutely spot-on, you always have the nagging feeling that Jackie’s mouth is more static than the voices dictate. This is a very minor issue, though, and you won’t stop yourself spiralling into the story as Jackie does. It isn’t an easy tale to swallow, remember, so prepare for some extremely depressing twists that make the game perpetually unpredictable.

The game starts in NYC. You play Jackie Estacado, an orphan taken in by the mafia from an early age, and you’re struggling to hide this fact from Jenny Romano, a childhood sweetheart. Uncle Paulie, the man who took you in and made you a killer, has decided that you’re too renegade and soft for the mob. Thus, he has fashioned a plan to kill you. It involves bombs. After escaping this fate, you decide to use your mysterious Darkness powers to take revenge.

Think you know The Darkness now, as a revenge-driven gangster game? You absolutely don’t. You see, at the end of the first chapter something massive happens. In terms of plot, in terms of atmosphere and setting, everything as you know it turns around. The Darkness evolves, it transforms, and suddenly you’re playing a completely different game from the one you were playing before. You’re in the trenches of the Great War, only nobody ever dies. Welcome to the Otherworld.

The Darkness is an FPS, no doubt about it, but the powers of The Darkness and extra elements push it into the realm of adventure. Elaborate side-quests, secret phone numbers and TV shows detail the area of New York, adding variation to a genre that is, at best, a bit stale. Although you’ll spend too much time in the New York subway, there’s enough in these civilized sections to keep you busy for hours.

Still, the gameplay itself is our main interest. It begins as a regular FPS, but it soon evolves into something beyond that with the extra abilities in tow. Soon enough, you’ll find yourself sneaking up on Paulie’s gangster cronies with the creeping dark, lobbing police cars with the demon arm and creating black holes to tear up entire groups of villains. By this point, you’re barely aware of your weapons as you try and come up with fiendish, tactical uses of your powers.

Using the basic weapons is actually a punishing affair. You could run in, cackling with glee as you tear up the place with double Uzis, but doing this alone will mostly kill you. The enemies are smart bastards, and they’re well positioned. They have tactical spots, people hiding behind objects and others to simply draw your fire. Even on the easiest difficulty setting, this isn’t an easy game, and you start almost every battle at a disadvantage. Making use of The Darkness powers is beyond essential, and they’re also fun to boot.

Starbreeze has worked hard to de-gimmick these features. Using them requires you to charge up your Darkness gauge which, in turn, requires you to take out the lights in order to initiate it. This can be frustrating at times, but the sheer fun you can have with them validates the often long periods of shadow making. Picking up a police car with the Demon Arm, a gigantic demonic whip, is immensely satisfying, but dropping it into a graveyard or using it as a battering ram? That’s the clincher. Unique, gratifying and constantly thrilling, you find yourself scrambling to incorporate them in battle, purely on the basis that you’re not used to having such freedom in a videogame. Developers often mistake freedom in games as mere rehashes of the GTA formula, while Starbreeze have clearly acknowledged that the fundamentals of the FPS genre required evolution for the next generation.

Does that make us sound like pompous twits? It does a bit. Well, to break it down on a simple, boring level, The Darkness is good. It oozes quality, and the issues it has are fairly hard to come by. While we already mentioned the frustration caused by taking out the lights, this becomes much easier in the latter parts of the game. One of the Darklings you can summon (those little goblin things we made a big deal of in our previous looks at the game) is called the Lightkiller, and its special ability is to put out the lights, as well as giving enemies a healthy dose of electrical charge. In addition to this, the Demon Arm takes out the lights in a near-automatic fashion by the middle of the game; thus, when you find the game has an annoying habit, the Darklings or Jackie’s abilities take care of it for you.

The Darklings themselves are a formidable part of the experience. You could, if you’re a jackass, ignore them altogether, but they’re amusing and odd enough to justify your attention. Ordering them into position requires a simple tap of the square button, while the same button returns them to your position. Keeping them out of the light can be a pain, but in the right circumstances they can save your skin. There are four kinds to collect: there’s the stabbing and biting Beserker, the barely female Gunner, the explosively suicidal Kamikaze Darkling and finally, the aforementioned Lightkiller. Some are better than others, but the use of each one is always determined by the situation; if there are too many enemies, then the Kamikaze will likely fail. In a stealth situation, however, he would become the most relevant Darkling available. The Beserker is more useful in tight situations, and so on.

This level of tactical consideration sounds a little forceful on paper, but in the game it becomes a natural part of the experience. There’s one section, in the third chapter, in which you find yourself bombarded with a SWAT team. Some are hiding, some are in high positions and others are gunning for you directly. On top of this shit-hitting-the-fan action, they all have riot shields, and are, therefore, difficult to hit. They’ve also activated spotlights, wouldn’t you know, so the whole ‘Darkness’ thing you have is made pretty redundant.

How, then, would a person solve this spiralling madness? Well, you’d initially hide in the entrance tunnels. After using the Creeping Dark to take out the hidden enemies, you end the higher enemies with a well placed Black Hole. Then you can use a Lightkiller Darkling to take out the lights, before polishing off the easier-to-hit SWAT fools with a dose of gun-to-legs firepower, followed by a nice Demon Arm through the chest. Job done.

That though, is just one interpretation of how you would beat that section of The Darkness. The amount of variables thrown at you is, at first, overwhelming, but time and experience with the game will teach you to optimise your abilities, which then allows you to have the most fun possible. Along with the gorgeous graphics, the great story and sheer grit of the atmosphere, the gameplay in The Darkness is a cut above in terms of variation.

Then again, we weren’t entirely surprised by this level of quality. As we reckoned in our previous looks at the title, Starbreeze was a developer of both skill and commitment, with its Chronicles Of Riddick title echoing a similarly intelligent use of a moderately successful licence. In all honesty, we don’t think that a big-budget Hollywood movie could interpret The Darkness comics with the same quality or attention. This isn’t like the Spider-Man games, for example, where the developer simply took note of his swinging ability and developed the game from there. Starbreeze genuinely squeezes every last drop of possibility from the comics, and in doing so it puts every other comic, film and television licence to shame.

It’s easy to isolate The Darkness’s good points. The amount of stuff you can mess around with masks most of the issues with it, but after some time they become more apparent. Adventuring through the streets of New York, for example, can really take its toll on you when you’re forced into the subway for the umpteenth time. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were all a giant, seamless New York that you explore without boundaries. Instead of that, however, small scenes of Jackie – usually posing or telling a story about his past – break up the action. These scenes are load screens, essentially, and while you appreciate them at first, hearing Jackie’s story about Candy the prostitute loses its credibility the fifth time around.

As we said, we don’t expect a sandbox experience with a title like The Darkness, but loading screens are a little irksome on the PS3. It feels like a necessary evil for the action available, but we were really hoping for a seamless experience. Not so, sadly. Still, when you’re moving in the right direction they’re a great substitute for real cut-scenes, which often require their own load times. A double-edged sword, then: interesting and captivating when relevant, trite and angering when they’re not.

The subway exploration loses its charm pretty quickly, but there are reasons to linger in these detailed environments. For one, the game has a ton of varied side-quests that extend the length of the experience. Trust us, you’ll want do them. For example, a lady from the south, Charlene Warburton, challenges you to pick up some coins off of the train tracks. Crazy shit, right? Definitely. You will, however, find yourself egged into doing it again and again, each time ran over by the train before you can collect them all. It’s madness, but it works.

Other quests, such as a homeless man’s ambition to busk with the harmonica, skilfully fuse both the adventure elements of the game with the shooting aspects. In most first-person shooters, this sort of thing is sacrificed for a longer, more streamlined main quest. Rather than conforming to that theory, Starbreeze Studios structures them in opposition to the time-wasting write-offs that most games have to offer. It seems silly, we know, but only through playing the game will you understand the appeal of picking up coins, or retrieving a man’s harmonica. Little touches, once again, add more to the experience than you’d initially think.

It keeps going, as well. Starbreeze actually hired graffiti artists from the edge of Stockholm to take care of the subway decoration, and it looks lovely with the ingame lighting. Occasionally, you’ll hit a Grand Theft Auto-style parody poster, only to find graffiti commenting on what it’s actually advertising. Again, nice touch, and it’s all the more rewarding when you realise there are secrets hidden within the scribbling...

Ah! The secrets. After collecting various phone numbers and letters in the game, you’re treated to an entire back catalogue of Top Cow comics, while other secrets await your discovery (see Extra, Extra…). If you miss some the first time around (and we can absolutely guarantee you will), then you’ll find some replay value in The Darkness. Besides, some of the set pieces are very cool, and the multiple methods of murder are tasty and fun. Tasty, that is, in a healthy way that doesn’t leave us actually eating limbs on the subway. Moving on...

Factor in some exceptionally refined voiceover talent, and you also have a story that is both believable and real. Mike Patton, ex-singer of Faith No More, does a solid job of voicing The Darkness. It never gets too hammy, and it makes for a nice contrast with the Sicilian dominance of the rest of the characters. Kirk Acevedo, star of Band Of Brothers and Oz is another standout as Jackie, and the ante of his performance carries you right through to the end. Does it ever get too hammy? Not really. For a videogame, this is exceptional stuff, and it looks even better when you’ve seen Billy Dee Williams embarrass himself on the new Command & Conquer game.

It’s suitable in length, as well. On the first playthrough, it should take you around 14 hours depending on how much you want to see, which we found was a sensible end point for the game. It ends in a frantic shootout at a Lighthouse, and, we think you’ll agree with us on this, it ends appropriately. Afterwards, you could spend days reading the comics or finding the collectables, so it’s a more robust package than we assumed it would be.

Overall, then, The Darkness combines the best bits of mafia and war films, producing one complete, intriguing experience. If its Chronicles Of Riddick game wasn’t proof enough, then it’s The Darkness that solidifies Starbreeze Studio’s reputation as a quality licence developer. Give the team any licence and results will be forthcoming. The PS3 drought is finally over.

Samuel Roberts