Again, as January has less game releases than a monk has mistresses and due to the fact that I have still not had time to finish L.A Noire (or stomach the thought of having to play the Battlefield 3 campaign, for a rant (Hey I've put it off for a while now, don't judge)) I have decided to review another one of these big demos which have arrived on Steam and this time, it is The Darkness 2.
In possibly the most shocking revelation since David Beckham was revealed to be the anti-Christ and subsequently kicked everybody's pet tortoises to death and pissed on there bodies, The Darkness 2 is a sequel to a game called The Darkness (Shock, horror), a game even more amazingly based on a comic named... You guessed it, The Darkness. There are so many surprises here I bet you wouldn't care if I told you that God existed and his whole purpose is to give out STD's.
You play Mob Boss/ Japanese tentacle porn creator, Jackie Estacado, a man who wields something sinister called The Darkness, and involves some other organisation trying to get this off you, headed by a man who looks like a cross between the Hunchback of Notre Dame and a cupboard.
Other than a bit where I am being crucified by this guy, the demo starts with him being walked through a restaurant with about as much interactivity as a wooden floor. As you walk through you hear more Italian Americans than in The Godfather if it was written by Super Mario. After a while of walking through this area, I'm shoved into what seems to be a section which is more on rails than Stevenson's Rocket, as you are dragged through the area while shooting at a rival gang.
So after having more excitement sucked out of me than a man with erectile dysfunction being offered a blow job, I finally get to control my character with his aforementioned tentacles. Shame that, due to the controls being more fiddly to control than a buttered up piece of butter, you can never see how fun they actually are. Instead they are more annoying than having a deer kick you in the balls continuously. Pressing middle mouse button and then swinging you're mouse around like a cat on ecstasy also leaves you disoriented in the same way that spinning around on a crashing car may do.
Even then, that is before mentioning the terrible game mechanic of having to shoot down the street lights. It is a jarring change of pace when one minute you are ripping apart crime like a psychotic Batman, when the next you're shooting down lights like a 5 year old hoodlum. And there is little way around this when, if you don't, it takes away you're power. You're basically a shit Superman, but instead of Kryptonite, you just have a phobia of streetlights.
However if the game decided to send more than three enemies at me (remember this is the demo, it'll probably be different in the actual game) or isn't wrenching control from me like a clingy 3 year old, then you will be able to see the amazing violence in the game. It seems to have been left over from the point when the developers decided to remove all the fun parts out of the game. The more and more bloodthirsty ways to kill people seem to have come straight from the mind of Jason Voorhees after he stubbed his toe on a nail. They get pretty shit when they repeat though, and it becomes the equivalent of watching a wall dry on repeat.
Another good point is the cell shaded art style, which really isn't a style I like in games, for example the Prince of Persian re-boot... However that may be because that game made me feel like I was hammering a nail through my spine. It suits the game really well.
The camera (i.e. you're view) bobs about more than a boat in a hurricane. It makes the game sickening and horrible to play, and I would rather have somebody piss down my throat than have to endure that again. It gave me a bigger headache than the time I slammed my head onto a railway track when a train was coming down. It also makes it harder to aim than it is too make a cake after having both your eyes torn out with ice picks. This is also not helped by the limited FOV.
So overall I wouldn't recommend this game from what the demo shows, unless you happen to like the taste of sucking on your own balls, as I would recommend it more than this piece of shit.
Or you could just ignore this whole rant and buy it on the sole reason that there is a cockney monkey/imp thing that says "God save the Queen", possibly the most redeeming thing in the entire demo.
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