IncarnatedDemon
Well-known Member
The Darkness 2 revised 1.1
There's always a little light in the darkness.
I will not be talking about the story, however, rest assure it is a good story. I went and bought Darkness 1 just because of Darkness 2's story.
In Darkness 2 you are the host of a evil thing called "The Darkness". This is implemented into the gameplay through two tentacles and supernatural abilities. The tentacle on your left can be used to pick up items, grab a enemy's throat or devour a corpse's heart from distance (to heal yourself), while the the one on right can be used to slash horizontal or vertical. The abilities you can have is bought from a shop using "dark essence" as currency which you receive a amount of depending on how you kill your enemies. However, there is a disadvantage to being the host of the Darkness (though logical and reasonable) - you can't stand light. When your in the light your sight of surroundings is less as if a flashbang had gone off, you will not be able to regenerate health and your super natural abilities may not work or you won't be able to use them.
Eventually a helper will arrive called "Darkling", he is a manifestation of the Darkness. He will guide you in the game and provide first class entertainment such as peeing on a fallen foe.
There are various ways for you to finish off the enemies. If you go with the common approach (shooting) you will be able to with few rifles, shotguns, smgs and handguns. No sniper rifles though but i presume including them could be counterproductive. You can dual wield two smgs or handguns or mix the two category, while rifles and heavy weapons must be used with two hands. So at anytime you can swap between dual wielding two weapons or a rifle with d-pad.
Meleeing can be done with a weapon or using the right tentacle to slash. However, this option is quite limited as running around meleeing doesn't seem to be very efficient method considering the distance between you and the enemies in many situations, and that your more vulnerable the closer you are to the enemy. The enemies can be meleers with armours, and you don't want to slash at one of them while being shot by others.
The third option is throwing objects, you can throw items from a corpse of a fallen enemy to a pool cue. I once threw a sharp pipe shaped object from a big distance at one of the enemies, when i was arrived at the spot they were shooting from i noticed that the pipe had gone through the head of the enemy and "nailed" him to the wall. What's also neat with this approach is that after impact the game will slow down (just like DmC when you finish HollowVergil).
You will also be able to throw the darkling once you buy the ability for that.
On top of that you can buy abilities or perks to improve the effiency of these methods. One ability gives the right(melee) tentacle spikes when you devour a heart, however, this is not very efficient considering that this lasts for few seconds but i suppose the intention of it is to use the melee tentacle to keep melee enemies at bay when they are close to you instead of going around slashing everyone. I must say though that i would have liked for the spikes that the right tentacle gets to last longer because that would allow me to maybe use that tentacle more (most of time i used guns and major abilities).
It is also possible to execute enemies for more health, ammo, or other perks, however, this method of killing is limited to when the enemy has his back turned to you or they are stunned and within short range. You grab them with left tentacle. Executions is done with tentacles and it's brutally spectacular sight.
A ability that i think is GENIUS is the "Pump and Load" ability (i think that's the name): it allows you to reload shotgun quickly by pressing a button. For PS3 it is L1 to load and R1 to shoot. So you press L1 after every shot to load a bullet into the weapon for faster fire, it's very efficient ability/perk and if your a shotgun lover it is a must have perk.
There are many other abilities that you will enjoy, but i just wanted to mention the "Pump and load" in particular because it is a perk i think is very good feature.
Don't worry though, the game has many difficulty with the highest one being "Don", so you will not being overkilling enemies (either that or i am awesome at the game).
Generally the gameplay is fun, i have played Call of Duty which even though is quite redundant serie (stop it already!) it has one of the best fps games in terms of aiming and shooting accuracy, and i can't say that when i aimed or shot with guns in Darkness 2 that i felt that the experience was any less than Call of Duty.
The enemies and their AI is pretty good, i have died alot playing Darkness 2. No major complaint there.
Generally i can't say i have much critism towards the game. For a second entry into the Darkness serie i think it was pretty well done and it deserved to sell more than 500K. Unfortunately that never happened. I have heard people say "Bioshock is the type of FPS games we should see more of!", and i must say i haven't played Bioshock (watched videos though) and if Bioshock Infinite is the type of gameplay you enjoy then Darkness 2 may be the game for you to buy depending on if i am right that Bioshock has similarities with Darkness 2 (good story and a different approach to fps).
So if your a Bioshock fan and you want a game to play, check out videos of Darkness 2 and see if i am right, if i am right then i hope you enjoy Darkness 2 if you buy it.
There are small minigames in the game such as collecting "artifacts" (with story relevant history) and shooting pigeons or beer bottles with Dolfo.
I will not go into the multiplayer part of the game. I will save that for it's own review, and i haven't exactly finished all of the missions.
However, know that Darkness 2 offers alot more after you have finished the singler player campaign.
This review does not represent everything the singleplayer gameplay has to offer but i tried to cover most of it, i hope it has been helpful.
VERDICT: Worth buying even if your not a FPS lover, but your open to the genre. And with the price tag it is at nowdays (less than 21 dollars) it is a must buy for FPS gamers. This verdict takes into account all of the content of the game. However, you must wait for my multiplayer review of the gameplay before you know the next aspect of "Darkness 2".
