Product Description

Fearless Mafia hitman Jackie Estacado is part of the Franchetti crime family helmed by vicious cousin Paulie. On the eve of his 21st birthday, Jackie is suddenly possessed by the terrifying and spectacular powers of the Darkness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1241 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Take 2
• Released on: 2007-07-20
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• ESRB Rating: Adults Only
• Platform: PLAYSTATION 3
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Multilingual
• Dimensions: .31 pounds

Amazon.co.uk Review

Developer Starbreeze Studios seem to have found a niche for themselves creating top notch video games based on licensing tie-ins that hardly anyone has ever heard of. The Chronicles of Riddick may have been a film flop but the game was one of the best first person shooters on the original Xbox. This follow-up is based on an obscure comic book about a Mafia hitman with the rather handy ability to conjure up the eponymous Darkness – source of seemingly unlimited demonic power.

To some degree the game can be played like a standard first person shooter, with main character Jackie Estacado proving a dab hand with a wide variety of standard pistols, machine guns and shotguns. The Darkness powers though are obviously the game’s real draw, with the ability to use super strong tentacles to fling around objects in the impressively interactive game world or act as a shield or even spy camera. The most interesting of the Darkness abilities though is summoning special imps called darklings. These come in twenty different types, from interrogator to kamikaze to decoy, and ensure there’s always more than one way to tackle any obstacle.

The only problem with the Darkness as a power is that it doesn’t work in strong light, which is where the need for more traditional weaponry comes in – especially when shooting out lights to get your demonic groove back on. The graphics are superb (The Chronicles of Riddick still looks better than many low end 360 games) and despite its obscure origins the Darkness itself turns out to be the most interesting thing to happen to first person shooters in years.
Harrison Dent

Manufacturer's Description
Fearless Mafia hitman Jackie Estacado is part of the Franchetti crime family helmed by vicious cousin Paulie. On the eve of his 21st birthday, Jackie is suddenly possessed by the terrifying and spectacular powers of the Darkness. Though his supernatural entity lets him wreak terrible havoc on his enemies, the Darkness also has a strong will of its own. Jackie must learn to control the Darkness that lurks within him while harnessing its power to overthrow Paulie and fulfill his destiny.

Customer Reviews

A hidden gem
The Darkness is a game that seemed to arrive and disappear without any fanfare whatsoever, which is a shame because it seems Starbreeze have pulled another fiesty rabbit out of the bag.

If you've played Starbreeze's previous creation "The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher bay", either on the Xbox or the PC you'll feel right at home with The Darkness. It has much the same feel to it - a very different story but another oddly gifted and intriguing protagonist.

You play the role of Jackie - an Italian-American in his early 20's with the stereotypical mafia connections. During the game you'll take on Jackie's demons - both metaphorically and literally.

You see, Jackie has been posessed by a demon who answers to the name "The Darkness". This demon will spend much of the game trying to take control of your soul and speaking to you in a typically demonic way (voiced by Mike Patton from Faith no More). Aside from the talking he does provide some very useful skills which you earn as you progress through the game. From the start you can bring your darkness heads from out of back - these look like snake heads that weave around and fight with eachother if you leave them alone long enough. The one skill you start off with is the creeper, which lets you send one the heads crawling around on the floor, through open windows and vents to open doors or just sneak up on an unsuspecting victim and rip out his heart (nice!). You can also summon "darklings". These are goblin-type creatures that run around doing your bidding for you and offer a general supporting role. You start off with a "berzerker" and then collect a "gunner", "kamikaze" and "light killer" along the way. Later on your darkness skills develop - some big thrusting probes that allow you to lift heavy objects, a "black hole" that sucks in everything around it and a few others that are revealed as the plot progresses.

The game is a first-person shooter first and foremost, but unusually it plays like an "open world" style game. You start off in one area of New York and gradually open up other areas and you have the freedom to move between these areas as you wish - mainly to collect the pieces of paper you find lying around. These collectables unlock bonus content if you use one of the payphones dotted around the city. Later on you'll find letters that need to be placed in mailboxes in order to unlock bonus content.

Graphically it is functional, not hugely impressive but not bad either. The sound changes between atmospheric and hard rock depending on the situation and the story is great - well paced and often leads into some really exciting situations and shoot-outs.

It could be described as short, but its a game that sucks you in and leaves you wanting more rather than being too long and drawn out.

Highly recommended.

PS3 - The Darkness
To be honest, I purchased this game with low expectations, thinking that it would probably be rather dull. But being a new PS3 game that I didn't have, I decided i would buy it to add to my collection.
How wrong I was; as soon as you start playing, you are thrown into a world of interactivity. You start off in a car, which most games would have a simple, drawn-out cut-scene, but the darkness for PS3 goes a step further - allowing you to use the analog sticks to shift your view in the back of the convertible. Most games only allow cut-scenes like this to be viewed from one angle every time, but this allows you to view it in multiple angles, making it feel a lot more realistic!
However, cut-scenes are not what games are about; direct game play, in a game for this price, needs to be impressive. The darkness tops this, and goes a step further just for the sake of it. The whole environment surrounding you is interactive, ranging from light switches; trains pulling up in stations, allowing you to board them, and then travel to a new environment; great execution techniques that you can perform on your enemies (almost makes me nostalgic of manhunt); and even flushing toilets.
The diversity of weaponry is also amazing, ranging from multiple pistols to heavy-duty machine guns. And the graphics... the graphics... they are awesome on HD, easily rivaling Resistance and high-spec PC games such as DOOM 3.
It's not often that I give a game a perfect review; I believe there is always room for improvement, no matter how good a game is, but I really struggled to think how this game could be improved, and eventually came to the conclusion that, for the first time, a game deserves perfection for the attention to detail and the enjoyment that it offers its players.

Because I have only had the game for a day, I remain ignorant of the rest of the game play from the point I am at, at the moment (which is not very far), so I can only judge the first few chapters of playing. However, I'm sure "the darkness" will continue in its spectacularly formidable game play.

atmospheric and some nice touches
I love interesting, slow atmospheric games and so much about this game was satisfying.

Right from the start I was impressed by the tube stations, the sounds and the realistic behavior of the other people. there are televisions you can watch whole films on! and loads of other nice touches like that. The voice acting is also first rate. the first world war levels are genuinely eerie in places. I'm very interested in toilets in games and I'd say this game has the best toilets yet, you can almost smell the urine.

Things I was disappointed by included one or two glitches with sub missions. The overall depressing feel of the game. limited scope of the environments, for example what there is is excellent, but you go back there so many times, it would have been nicer to have a little more size and variety.

A very interesting an original game though.