The Darkness

It's Jackie Estacado's twenty-first birthday and the mafia assassin is about to receive the most unusual family heirloom imaginable. Jackie becomes host to a creature of literal darkness that seeks to puppeteer him as it has for generations of his ancestors. But Jackie isn't going to submit before he's revenged his girlfriend death and brought down the head of the Family that killed her.

The Darkness is a game which is difficult to pigeonhole. On the surface, it's a first person shooter with some demonic powers that augment the usual arsenal of weapons the genre has become known for. Sitting a shoulder button away from the usual assault rifle and shotgun are a whip-like tentacle, snake-like 'Creeping Dark', Darkness-powered handguns, and a literal black hole. These abilities unlock gradually, and by the time you're fully powered up, you have numerous options to tackle any given enemy encounter. You might start off by scoping out a room with the Creeping Dark, stealthily moving up a wall, through a vent, before slithering down behind an unsuspecting gangster and biting his face off. Now the other enemies are alerted, you might storm the room, using a tentacle to smash out the lights - the dark doesn't just provide a tactical advantage, it also powers your abilities. Seeing you're outnumbered, you might cast a black hole at the end of the room, sucking a half dozen guys into it, before switching to your Darkness Guns to pick off the rest. Figuring out such strategies on the fly is the most rewarding part of the combat, and if there's a criticism, it's that you often feel vastly overpowered compared to your foes, rather than being forced to use your powers as efficiently as possible to get out of trouble. When a room is finally cleared of enemies, the corpses provide the fuel needed to level up your powers. Standing over a dead body and hitting a button sends one of your Darkness tentacles burrowing into the chest cavity, emerging with a fresh heart to satisfyingly gulp down.

Though the general conceit is patently ridiculous, The Darkness manages to fall on just the right side of absurdity. The supernatural aspects of the narrative mesh well with the more traditional mafia revenge story, but it is the attempts made to ground the story in the real world that are most welcome. Instead of being just a generic, linear FPS, the game's developers, Starbreeze, have added a more open, adventure game element, that while nothing near the scale of a Grand Theft Auto, offers a version of New York that via streets and a working subway system, is open to explore. There's a distinct lack of handholding when it comes to navigating the city: simple tasks like being asked to meet your girlfriend at her apartment become enjoyable scavenger hunts as you need to use street signs, maps and even tourist information kiosks to find your way. The reward for finding your girlfriend is one of the most unique in video games, not because it is dramatic or thrilling, but because it is so simple and natural: She gives you a birthday cake and you have a chat. She invites you to sit on the couch with her. You throw your arms around each other and turn on the TV where, still in first person, you can flick through the channels, maybe watch an old episode of Flash Gordon; a couple of music videos; even To Kill a Mockingbird in its entirety. As game developers push the envelope of technology in the quest for greater fidelity to the real world, it's amazing to see a group of people go in a very different direction. To become immersed in this game world, it seems you don't need graphical tricks and programming advances, you need exceptional voice actors and a virtual cuddle.

The Darkness is by no means a perfect game. On a technical level it suffers from an erratic aiming system, and an agonisingly slow walking speed; on a narrative level, it descends into a muddle of comic book cliches that belie the game's source material; while the thrill of roaming the city and encountering its inhabitants is initially captivating, you'll quickly see the limited scope of the world, and simplistic side quests which merely serve to make you backtrack across familiar ground. None of these criticisms will stay with you for long after you've finished the game though. Instead, it will be those initial feelings of the unexpected, of a developer melding often stale genres to create something quite unlike anything else you've played. I've a feeling that when we look back on The Darkness in a few years, we'll see it as something special, something which didn't do everything right, but which pointed in the direction the medium was headed.