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Press X to let go...
By Kentish
On paper, it’s not exactly the most difficult of requests in videogame history. After all, you’ve just eviscerated and disembowelled a militia’s worth of eerily identikit goons – and defiled their corpses for good measure – on your way to completing Digital Extremes’ remarkably gruesome tale.
But – and we should say at this point, SPOILER ALERT – in its context, you find yourself unable to accede to the button prompt. In fact, you might, like me, put down your controller and let the scene just play on, and on, and on. Because at its heart, The Darkness 2 is a love story, and after all that Jackie Estacado has been through, all that pain and suffering, he deserves one last dance with his ghostly love Jenny.
Set two years after Starbreeze’s original, The Darkness 2 finds Jackie emotionally tortured by guilt, and soon after, physically assailed by a mysterious organisation hell-bent on extracting the darkness from within. From the opening scene, in which the familiar iconography of a mafia-patronised restaurant is turned upside down by an all-out assault by The Brotherhood, the game casts Jackie in the role of both hunter and prey.
And what a predator he has become. With the ability to wield guns in each hand, to devastating effect, his snake-like Darkness arms frankly take the piss, transforming Jackie into a whirling dervish of death – skewering, ripping, snapping, biting. You almost feel a degree of sympathy for the cowering fools who are minced and then subjected to open-heart surgery as they lie twitching on the floor. And while your ability to wield the Darkness is still very much governed by the need to fight in the dark, the stealth elements of the first game have been jettisoned in favour of a relentless pursuit of claret.
It is also linear in the extreme, with none of the side-quests and subway hopping that populated the first game – this is graphic novel brought to life through a gorgeous cel-shaded lens, and one that has no intention of out-lasting its welcome. You’ll be done with the main quest inside ten hours, and the Vendetta missions – a series of loosely inter-linked quests that introduce four additional assassins – barely add a third of that play-time again.
The game does at least enable you to customise Jackie’s abilities, trading essence acquired through killing for upgraded powers, which you can unlock through a branching skill tree. But this is no Bulletstorm exercise in stylish slaughter – it merely ensures a gradual escalation of power – such as black holes, gun kata-esque sharp-shooting and reduced Darkness cooldown – to combat the increasingly belligerent Brotherhood.
That The Darkness 2 is so much more than the mere sum of its parts, is down to the quality of its script and the game’s confidence in the quiet moments, when Jackie is tortured by ghostly glimpses of Jenny, dancing, flitting in and out of his consciousness. Amid the corpses and the cussing, the love story actually blossoms, and when that final moment of peace breaks out, gentle passivity is the only weapon you can wield.
March 2012
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