The Darkness

The Darkness caught me by surprise. Actually, much to my shame, I forgot The Darkness is the new game from Starbreeze Studios, the Swedish team that developed The Chronicles of Riddick, one of the rare movie tie-ins that not only didn't suck, but was an awesome game in its own right.

That's a lot of dead cops.

Sucked into the wormhole.

The Darkness is their latest game, a tie-in to the comic book of the same name. The player takes on the role of a mob hitman that died at the age of 21 and was possessed by demons. Whenever he's in the darkness, the demons come out to play, and boy do they like to play with the New York police.

So essentially, The Darkness can be characterized as a superhero FPS. The demonstration that was shown here in Leipzig is the same one from the E3. However, we did get to see the game intro, which was new since the big show - a frantic car chase through the streets of New York. Actually, the car chase leads to a fatal crash in which the main hero dies, but you also get to actively participate in it. The designers decided that it would be great to skip the boring tutorials and show off the good stuff right off the bad.

The car chase scene was fast, furious (pardon the pun) and very gruesome. It also had a lot of personality and a great feel to it. Starbreeze is using a technology they call Vocap. It's a way for them to motion capture the actors (and their movements and facial expressions) as they are doing the voice overs. As a result, the game feels incredibly cinematic and just very fun.

The E3 part of the presentation gave us a chance to see some of the super powers at our anti-hero's disposal. He finds himself trapped and surrounded by the police in a New York building. Moments later, the producer that was playing the game starts shooting at the lights, and as the lights go out, these Hydra-like demons start emerging around the player, along with the Goblin-like little demons with power drills and chainsaws. Needless to say, the police didn't do too well against them. While the main hero has guns to use, the real fun comes from using your demon powers - using huge tentacles to fling cars into air with ease, and seeing the little Goblin-like creatures drill holes in the policemen's chest with power drills. The action was tense and fun to watch. The next scene had our hero using a wormhole-like power that creates a distortion in space that simply sucks in all the living creatures.

The physics looked spectacular and highly believable.

Considering that Starbreeze is working on the game I fully expect The Darkness to have just as much character and edge as Chronicles of Riddick.

The lead designer told us that we should expect something like 10-15 hours of gameplay, in addition to the multiplayer mode.

The Darkness is scheduled to appear on the Xbox 360 in early 2007, that's as close as they got with the release date.

Also, another game feature that was advertised by Starbreeze was the fact that you can watch movies in game. Something like 200 hours of footage. Now, for the life of me I can't understand why this is cool, or why anyone would want to watch movies inside a video game, but that's another matter altogether.

The game looks great and that's the important bit.

-- Uros '2Lions' Jojic