The Darkness Review

Apparently I have been misled on the behavior of black holes. I was under the impression that black holes had a gravitational pull so great that even light could not escape. If this game is to be believed, black holes have a pretty small radius in which things will get sucked into them, and after a few seconds the things will come falling back out of them again. Dead perhaps, but certainly not disintegrated, torn apart molecule by molecule, as your grandaddy would have you believe. Regardless, I guess they seem pretty effective at killing gangsters.
The Darkness is based on a comic book about a hitman who apparently inherits some sort of demon that allows him to create black holes, shoot guns (because you need demonic powers for this), whip people with tentacles, summon little demons known as darklings to do his bidding and send out little snake guys to rip people's hearts out. The storyline is actually one of the game's strongest points, involving traveling between the real world, a seedy city full of gangsters and corrupt cops trying to kill you, and the Darkness world, a twisted vintage war zone full of zombies and dead relatives. You travel back and forth between these two worlds on a quest of revenge and to attempt to reign in your Darkness powers which perpetually seek to overpower and control you.
The game does a fairly good job of balancing the cool, crazy, creepy world of The Darkness with the more drab city world. I personally would have liked more Darkness world and less city, especially less of the "hunt this, fetch that"-style missions that became repetitive and dull pretty quickly and did nothing to drive the plot forward. Aside from that, the game does a good job of slowly introducing new Darkness powers and providing a good mix of action and atmosphere. The controls are generally pretty responsive for a console first person shooter and some of the unique mechanics of the game such as the little snake guys you can send out on reconnaissance missions to eat the hearts of more evil men than you controlled as well as could be expected for such an unusual feature. They do occasionally get stuck on random bumps in streets or walls or even seemingly invisible barriers of some kind but those incidents are infrequent enough that it doesn’t create a serious issue.
The graphics and sound I felt were appropriate for the game. As the title would suggest, the game is very dark. In fact, you spend a sizeable portion of the game shooting out lights since your powers thrive in darkness. It's an interesting game mechanic that works pretty well. The game offers no meter to gauge how much darkness energy you have but does a sufficient job showing it through the snake guys and how excited or bummed out they look. I would like to mention from a sound point that I felt the majority of the voice acting in the game ranged from pretty good to amazing. Mike Patton, in particular, as The Darkness was an inspired choice, Patton capable of careening from crazed terror to feeble panic all within the span of seconds. Based on his impressively wide range of musical projects exploring the dark and the bizarre, he seems an ideal fit for the game.
Overall I think Starbreeze has done a very good job with representing the comic in video game form (despite the fact that it veers wildly from the source's storyline). In using the light/dark mechanic of their previous Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, they've created a great game full of atmosphere and intensity that succeeds despite its flaws.