Darkness. She surrounds us. She hides many secrets. Sometimes it seems to you that she follows you on your heels: hiding in the shadows when the sun turns its gaze on this world, hiding in the corners here and there. And as soon as night falls, she gets out of there, becomes bigger, stronger. She pulls her all-pervading tentacles towards you, envelops you and whispers: “It’s all an illusion, decoys.”. “.
Welcome to the StopGame blogs! 8 years have passed since “Darkness” returned to the computer world and, unfortunately, most likely for the last time. Someone disliked her because she turned out to be “different”, while everyone was waiting for another “that one” The Darkness. But personally, at that time I was still an inveterate PC boyar, due to the console exclusivity of the first “Darkness,” I was not familiar with the original, and therefore nothing clouded my feelings for the sequel, which sank into my soul. And after I completed it again in 2020, I realized that Darkness. still the same seductive person with whom we want to merge together and destroy everyone who gets in our way!
Roots of Evil
The story of “Darkness” began back in 1996 with the release of the 10th issue of the comic book series Witchblade, dedicated to the adventures of a sexy female detective from New York named Sarah Pezzini, whose manicured fingers got caught in a hellish glove from Necrovision (no, well, maybe not exactly from there, but it’s very similar, damn). This glove was created by the forces of Light and Darkness, and Sarochka, with the help of supernatural powers granted by the glove, began not only to more effectively investigate the affairs of the New York police department, but she also had to confront other mystical forces that threaten the world of people.
In that very tenth issue, the protagonist of the future games The Darkness, a professional mafia killer, appears for the first time Jackie Estacado, who inherited his father’s strength Darkness, rewarding its bearer with very interesting goodies, which we will talk about later. In the same year, “Darkness” received its own line of comics, which became very successful and was published from 1996 to 2013, and in 2018 the publishing house Top Cow Productions even announced a restart, but this is too far away, let’s roll back a little, to 2005.
In the wake of the success of The Darkness comic Majesco Entertainment buys the rights to develop a computer game based on. At that time, Majesco published the well-known Psychonauts and Advent Rising, but these games failed to sell at considerable expense, which is why the publisher suffered huge losses, and he had to resell the rights to “Darkness” to new hands. And these hands were extended by greedy businessmen from 2K Games in 2006. Craftsmen from Starbreeze Studios, who by that time had developed only 3 games: Enclave, Knights of the Temple and Chronicles of Riddic: Escape from Butcher Bay. In general, as you understand, the craftsmen were venerable. It is to them that 2K entrusts the development of a game adaptation of “Darkness”.
Starbreeze decided not to take as a basis the part of the story of Jackie Estacado when he reached the peak of his power. The developers wanted to show the very path of its formation… I won’t completely retell the plot of the first The Darkness, I’ll just briefly go over the events of the first game in the duology.
From Mud to Prince of Darkness
After the death of his parents, Jackie Estacado is a nephew Paulie Franchetti, who headed the New York mafia, ends up in an orphanage, but Uncle Paulie soon rescues him from there and takes him into personal education, but not out of good intentions, but in order to train the boy into a professional killer, with whose hands the head of the Franchetti clan would remove all his competitors. The guy grew up, reached adulthood and began to be popular in the clan, and Paulie began to see him as a threat to himself, saying that Jackie wants to seize the “throne”. Paulie was triggered and started hunting for his unwanted nephew.
This turn in Estacado’s biography became key, since it was then that the Darkness dormant in the depths of Jackie stirred and began to rush out (this happened to all carriers upon reaching adulthood). During the conflict, Jackie’s childhood friend and concurrently the love of her life, a girl named Jenny. Her death was a blow to the hero. Destroying everything and everyone, he subjugates the Darkness, takes revenge and becomes the head of the Franchetti clan. Few people know, but after Jenny, the protagonist of The Darkness and the main heroine of Witchblade one day, completely unexpectedly, have sexual intercourse, and they even give birth to a child! Jackie, how could you? WHAT ABOUT JENNY!? I’m still silent.
Don’t worry, they had a girl, and Darkness is passed down only through the male line, so the power remained with Jackie
The most unpleasant moment in this whole story is that the first “Darkness” at one time became available only to a select circle: for those who did not mind saving money from school lunches and saving on toilet paper… in short, for those who bought themselves a third curling iron or a 360th multicooker. The first The Darkness became exclusive to consoles, leaving the PC boyars (including me) with their noses, and to this day, and it’s already, for a second, the end of the 2020th century (!), there was not a single hint of a remake, or a remaster, or even a port of the game on a PC (I tried to play through emulators – nothing worked).
After the release of The Darkness, which sold more than a million copies, and therefore brought success and “respect+” to the publisher and developer, the contract between Starbreeze and 2K expired, and the developers continued their activities under the wing of Vivendi, who previously helped them with “Riddick”. A couple of years passed before 2K decided to develop The Darkness theme. Of course, the first thing they were going to do was contact Starbreeze again, but at that time they were already busy developing Syndicate, so the publisher began to look for a new artist. And it became the team Digital Extremes – creators of Paria, Warpath and DarkSector, and in the future the authors of one of the largest online fap games – Warframe.
After such a wonderful, colorful, incredibly diverse, interesting, story-oriented game like DarkSector (sarcasm) to expect something useful was a very dubious activity. And yet, the cunning Canadians were able to surprise me.
It’s just beginning.
The Darkness 2 takes us two years forward after the events of the first part. Jenny is dead, as is her killer Paulie. Jackie Estacado’s soul is empty, life has become gray and boring. He, of course, continues to play the role of the head of the mafia clan, but not in the way that the members of the “family” would like. Jackie’s wards loved and respected their young patron, but they were not happy with the current situation. Estacado’s old assistant named Vinnie organizes a meeting for his boss with two very cute twins in a prestigious restaurant, but suddenly the restaurant is attacked. The brains of both girls, having left the skull, sprinkle Estacado’s face, then shooting starts, explosions are heard, Jackie’s leg turns into a juicy steak, and then the hero himself almost dies.
It took Jackie a lot of hard work to subjugate the Darkness to her will and lock it inside herself two years ago. He became the first who managed to control it, because Darkness cannot have a master, its carrier is only a vessel for this supernatural entity… And the hour has come when it again breaks out of its spiritual prison. Thanks to the Darkness, Jackie remained alive, and the attackers were repelled. Among them was a certain ugly, lame guy who, apparently, led the assassination attempt on Jackie, and now the main character had to find out who this Quasimodo was and what he wanted from Estacado. And in the course of searching for answers, the hero begins to lose control over the Darkness, which with a tenacious grip penetrates into his consciousness and sends visions. Jackie then ends up in some hospital, where everyone perceives him as a psycho, and sometimes he actually sees Jenny, as if she was still alive.
Meanwhile, a threat arises that not only could cause the death of the head of the Franchetti clan, but it is also a threat to Darkness itself… (intrigue ooh)
Handsome Alfie. It’s a pity they didn’t give the antagonist a deep character, and he’s remembered only by his face
I liked the story in the game, despite its simplicity and simplicity, I still consider it a success. I have always loved stories about mafia showdowns and all sorts of mystical stories where something otherworldly rules the roost. Here I got both, and it was a very tasty cocktail. Not without its downsides, of course.
The most important disadvantage for me personally is the lack of three-dimensional interesting characters. The plot of the game is entirely dedicated to Jackie and his dramatic “love story,” as the developers themselves called it, that is, the emphasis in the game is on the protagonist, but… well, Jackie Estacado does not reach the level of a deep dramatic hero. I didn’t feel his pain and anxiety, and all this gloomy, overwhelming pathos of his didn’t seem to me an important attribute of a hero. Perhaps this is due to the Russian voice acting (play only with English voice acting!), and yes, she also made her negative contribution, but if we consider his behavior itself, then how the hero is staged, then, alas, Jackie did not evoke any special sympathy in me.
Periodically, the game contains inserts https://nonukcasinosites.co.uk/review/neptune-play-casino/ in which Jackie, sitting in the dark and alone, conducts a monologue about his thoughts and feelings that torment him throughout the game
The Darkness 2 is full of secondary characters, and each of them has the makings of a character, but, unfortunately, I can’t name a single one of Estacado’s associates who really stuck with me. Naturally, our satanic henchman doesn’t count. The Bes made me very happy… and not only because he doesn’t give a damn and piss on his defeated opponents… It’s as if all the other characters simply don’t have enough, let’s say, screen time to open up and bring a little more drama to the story. The developers did everything to show them alive: they gave each of them a name, made them chat with each other, make jokes in some cutscenes, gave us the opportunity to engage in dialogue with them… But at the same time, a couple of days will pass, and I won’t remember any of them. And it makes me sad.
The only thing I remember is that Johnny Powell went. By the way, he briefly retells the plot of the first game before the start of The Darkness 2. That is, this is not a stupid slideshow with a pretentious voice from behind the scenes, as is usually the case, but such a funny sketch with an animated comic and an amazing narrator in the person of Johnny.
“It started with bullshit: the planet is here. the sun is there. you’re cutting? And then people and all sorts of cows came. all sorts of crap all over the world!”Johnny would make an excellent author for a school biology textbook.
The main villain, who should be almost the first person in any good plot, which many people forget, was remembered only for his terrible mug. There was also a girl named Venus, but she remained in my memory only thanks to two huge higher educations. And then there was Jenny. I’m quite greedy for computer girls, and I’m not just talking about “higher education”, but also about the careful study of their personality traits, what makes them so similar to the real ones. Jenny is not the first beautiful woman in the gaming industry, but the way her appearance affected Jackie, surprisingly, influenced me too. I desperately wanted to finally find her, save her and reunite her with our super-dark protagonist, but alas, everything is not so simple.
In general, it was a very strange situation with the characters. It seems like there is something in them, but it’s just not fully revealed, from which the plot begins to lose its charm, because how can a plot do without outstanding heroes… I think the endings turned out worthy. There are two of them in the game, and one of them allows you to shoot a little more and make out with Jenny, although this choice does not depend on the player’s actions and does not have any special implications, you just need to choose one of two lines in the dialogue before the epilogue. One of the endings puts an end to this story, but the second (as I consider the true ending) gives a hint of a continuation, which I would still like to see not only in my dreams.
It’s clear that the game has been out for a long time, but for me, good, worthwhile games continue to live and do not lose relevance, and therefore I don’t want to spoil either the main plot or the ending.
Dark augmentations
There were quite a few people who were not delighted with The Darkness 2, all because it turned out to be different from what the first part was. But since I was not able to touch the original in person, I will judge The Darkness 2 only based on what I saw directly in the second “Darkness”, without drawing parallels in my mind with the first part.
The Darkness 2 starts slowly. When we find ourselves in an ill-fated restaurant, and one of the guys advises us to check out the bust of a brunette, nothing foreshadows trouble. In general, the scene in the restaurant was staged simply gorgeous, it’s like you’re in a movie: here someone is dissatisfied with the food, Vinnie, leading us around the establishment, stares at the backside of one madam, some angry idiot demands to take the leftover food with him; waitresses are scurrying around, and in general a farce reigns – in general, the immersive effect is powerful. And as soon as you are immersed in all this, there is a sudden turn in the best traditions of Call of Duty: a wild action game begins, Vinnie hands Jackie a gun and drags him into the shelter, and we have to shoot the emerging muzzles of the adversaries… In general, the beginning is epic – and this is not the last exciting scene that the authors have prepared for the player.
But if there were such scenes at every turn, we would get used to them very quickly, and they would not have the desired effect, and therefore, in between staged episodes, we will have to clear levels filled with various kinds of opponents using the guns and two hot tentacles that we are familiar with from dozens of other action games.
Moreover, wielding the latter is much more interesting than using a firearm. At first, realizing that the hero has not 2, but essentially 4 arms is quite difficult, but soon you get used to it and throughout the entire game you continue to fervently swing your toothy tentacles. They can grab everything that comes to hand and throw it at opponents, which comes in very handy when Jackie runs out of ammo. And besides this, with the help of tentacles, it is sometimes necessary to break down locked doors and tear wires in shields in order to be able to move on.
. including with the help of dark snakes, you can tear off the doors of the car and use them (and not only) as a shield (and then accurately throw it and cut the victim in half)
Fire-breathing thundersticks spewing deadly lead do not have much variability, all of them can be divided into light barrels – these are pistols and submachine guns, which can be carried with two at once (without excluding shooting in Macedonian style), and heavy ones – shotguns and assault rifles, and of these you can already carry only one barrel with you. Each type of gun has three varieties, but the difference between these options, even if there is one, is practically not felt during firefights. Unless the striker fires in single bursts, M-ka in short bursts, and the Kalash in long bursts.
But there is often a shortage of ammunition: the game irritates me so much every time that I never save and generously distribute lead to everyone, although it soon turns out that my pockets are empty and I have to carefully go into the shadows and beat the crap out of my enemies using hand-to-hand combat. In addition to the cartridges that can be picked up from the trunks of the dead, there are also special boxes scattered throughout the levels, and from them we get much more bullets and narrower ones for any trunk that is in our hands or in our bosom.
But there is also another way to replenish – this is the use of the powers of Darkness. Besides the fact that the devil’s tentacles are already purely aesthetically pleasing, swaying over Jackie’s shoulders, but they are also the ones that carry out a melee attack and, what’s even cooler “execution”.
Execution in The Darkness 2 is a special fatality, when our dark snakes tear the victim in half, cut them in half, tear off heads, cosplay as “Alien”, and my favorite is when one of the tentacles rips out the spine along with the enemy’s skull through the anus. These fatalities are not only very spectacular, but also provide certain bonuses. One execution restores the hero’s hit points, another replenishes ammunition, the third organizes a stylish shadow shield in Estocado’s hands, and the fourth speeds up the recovery of other demonic skills.
And these skills we have are Black hole, which appears in the enemy’s heart (with a certain probability) and, if thrown, it will begin to suck in the woodpeckers surrounding it; Swarm of insects, incapacitating enemies for a while and making them vulnerable; and finally, another skill, thanks to which Jackie’s firearms are shrouded in Darkness, and they begin to cause triple damage, but for a very short time. And these are just Jackie’s active abilities, the game also has a bunch of passives with their own goodies, but we won’t waste time listing them.
Leveling up is carried out at the expense of accumulated dark energy, which is awarded for ordinary murders, executions, searching for collectible relics, destroying light sources and devouring hearts from corpses, the latter, by the way, also restores hit points. The most points are given, of course, for murder, and, according to the precepts of Bulletstorm, the more sophisticated the death, the more energy. So you have accumulated a certain number of these points, however, in order to spend them, you still need to find a special shadow rift, interacting with which the game pauses, and a skill wheel opens for you, divided into 4 sectors: demonic abilities, executions, weapons and swarm. But I already talked about the skills themselves.
Don’t go out into the world!
An interesting mechanic in the game is interaction with light. Since Jackie is inhabited not by anyone, but by Darkness itself, the hero has to stay away not only from the sun’s rays, although there are almost none in the game, but also from electric lamps. As soon as Estacado gets into the circle of light, he begins to be flattened. The darkness inside the hero shrinks and deprives our mafioso of his protection and supernatural powers. So you have to shoot all the light bulbs you come across. “Wastefulness”!“you say and you’ll be right, I also advocate that Jackie unscrew the light bulbs and take them with him, and not unceremoniously fire at them… but these complaints are directed at the authors of the game.
Interesting fact. We distinguish colors only when light hits an object (in fact, it makes the world colorful in our eyes). In the game, on the contrary, as soon as the hero steps under a bright beam, everything around loses color and becomes gray
Sometimes it happens in the game that the light source is not attached to the wall or ceiling, but moves, being in the hands of restless hunters of Darkness. There is such a nasty kind of scoundrels here who carry spotlights on their shoulders and burn out Darkness on Jackie when he falls under a beam of light. And the enemies in The Darkness 2 are designed in such a way that as soon as a firefight starts, they will immediately keep an eye on us and know about all our movements. So the spotlight will follow everywhere. At such moments you have to rely only on the good old firearm and try to break the shining light bulb on the bastard’s shoulder as quickly as possible.
Not only the Darkness inside Jackie is afraid of the Light, but also our handy demon henchman. This guy is not as capable as Estacado, but he always tries to help us; he will attack one of the opponents, depriving him of the opportunity to fire a burst at the hero and making him vulnerable; it will show you the way if something suddenly happens that you manage to get lost. And the Imp could grab tentacles and throw them at enemies, which reminds me of a similar move in Evil Dead: Regeneration, where Ash kicked the dwarf.
Also, the Imp sometimes allows Jackie to see through his eyes and control his body, although these episodes are strictly scripted and occur only a couple of times during the game. At such moments, short stealth runs begin, when, playing as the Imp, it is necessary, for example, to find and hack an electrical panel so that Estacado can open the door. This dilutes the gameplay quite well and gives a break from the incessant adrenaline shootings. Jackie also sometimes finds himself in the hospital – an illusion created by the Darkness to protect the hero’s consciousness, and finally, between each mission, we go to a kind of hub, where you can listen to the chatter of your subordinates, chat with them yourself, stroll through your luxurious apartments, look at the collection of collected relics and find out your next goal.
The enemies themselves, in addition to the already mentioned carriers of searchlights and simple cotton shooters, also appear in the form of fat, tenacious stormtroopers who hide behind shields, guys with whips who snatch weapons from Jackie’s hands, fat boys with clubs who strive to get hit in hand-to-hand combat, and officially pumped up fighters with speed who dodge any attempt to grab them tentacles by the ass or throw some object at them.
In the best traditions of Bulletstorm, the game pushes you to deal with enemies as sophisticated (or perverted) as possible, and also likes to name each of the deaths, for example, on the screen you see the “Anaconda” kill
At the beginning of the game, we calm down the most ordinary bandits, without superpowers, shields and whips, all these guys appear gradually, acquire supernatural armor, which we have to knock down before allowing their tentacles to make deep penetrations, acquire flash grenades, which not only cause concussion, but also shrink the Darkness… and we have to adapt to these tricks. Hell begins somewhere in the middle of the game, when opponents come against us as one group in all their diversity. And that’s when the mindless action starts to challenge you.
There are also bosses in the game, with whom we sometimes had to work hard, but I would not call the fights with them anything extraordinary. These clashes lacked a little more scope and epicness, after all, these are bosses! And it’s also worth mentioning the complexity. In general, I’m far from hardcore and I always choose a level that’s comfortable for me, so as not to push myself as hard as possible, but to have fun with enough challenge… But playing The Darkness 2 at a level below Killer is simply boring, and the killer will seem light to some, so if you decide to play, take hard right away.
It’s all an illusion.
The Darkness is, of course, not XIII (Darkness rest its soul), which followed the style of the original comic so closely that comic strips and all sorts of “bangs” and “booms” appeared on the screen every now and then… and yet the creators of The Darkness also decided not to stray far from the original source. Thanks to cell-shading technology, visually the game turned out to be very contrasting and bright; the blood that gushes before your eyes literally every couple of seconds looks especially juicy when you use tentacles and execute opponents in the most disgusting ways. But at the same time, I’m far from a fan of this method of rendering graphics, and I don’t like the art in the comics themselves, and perhaps I’ll say a seditious thing now, but in my opinion, this dark story would benefit from a more realistic visual.
But the sound in the game is fine, I won’t even find fault. Atmospheric melodies in the background (I especially remember the very caric title theme of the game), the way the environment sounds, enemies and especially weapons. The Darkness 2 was one of the few games at the time where weapons felt so good. And not so much technically, but in sound. The sounds of gunfire in this game brought me complete pleasure from start to finish. For a shooter where most of the game is taken up by gunfire, this is critically important. The creators of The Darkness 2 coped with this task.
They also included several licensed songs in the game, which included The Offspring, In Flames, Ram jam with their Black Betty and a bunch of other performers, famous and not so well-known, but without a doubt suitable.
It seems to me that the developers could have played up Jackie’s appearance in the psychiatric hospital in a slightly more interesting way, so that the player would be more likely to think: “what if. “. By the way, you can also find The Darkness comics here, it’s good that the creators do not forget about the roots.
I didn’t notice any particularly serious shortcomings, other than those related to the plot and characters, except maybe a couple of small technical flaws. For example, it was somewhat inconvenient to select the direction of attack using the mouse. It often happened that I pulled the mouse a split second longer than required for an attack, which caused the camera to fly to the side or into the ceiling. And I also noticed one strange thing during the execution animation: here are two opponents running at me, one gets close at point-blank range at the moment when I grab the second with a snake and activate the execution; and after that for some reason I see my victim through that bastard who is spinning right in front of my nose. Not critical, but noticeable.
The Darkness 2 game is quite short, you can complete it in just 4, or at most 5 hours, but at the same time these 4-5 hours turned out to be very intense and unforgettable. The game does not have many varied and interesting features that could be stretched out over a longer playthrough so that the player does not have time to get bored. So The Darkness 2 has exactly the length it needed.
And for those for whom this was not enough, Digital Extremes introduced an additional “Vendetta” mode into the game, designed for cooperative playthrough. At the same time, he supplemented the plot with new details that were left behind the scenes in the main story: the rescue of Johnny Powell from the clutches of bandits, the search for artifacts of Darkness and the Spear of Destiny (yes, that same one).
The Darkness 2 is primarily a first-person shooter, and in this regard the game showed itself to be excellent. There is no need to think through your tactics and bother with complex mechanics. The second “Darkness” is a simple but solid meat action movie that can be played in one breath. Control of Darkness with all the ensuing abilities, fear of light and a charming Imp make this game even more interesting and noticeable among action films.
The plot is far from the main attribute of this genre, in most cases it serves only as a background for unrestrained action. In The Darkness 2, the developers tried to tell us a story, a dramatic one at that, but they did not have enough to develop their plot, especially to develop the characters, both secondary and main, to make them capable of squeezing emotions out of the player. But I will still count this attempt for myself.
I don’t exclude that, perhaps, if I had completed The Darkness of 2007, I would have restrained my ardor in praising the sequel, but if we consider it as an independent product, then this is a quite decent game that should not have been missed in 2012, and which I can safely recommend to everyone who has completed it. After all, even now Darkness remains the same seductive person.