DARKEST OF DAYS REVIEW (PC) Posted by The_PC_Gamer on Sep 20, 2009 18:44 (347 days ago) |
The issues with storytelling are just one of the items that break the immersion in the game. Another huge example is the appearance of futuristic weapons in the past. Now, being the agent from the future, I can understand that you are already comfortable with the guns and are able to use them. Your historical allies, however, seem to be absolutely ignorant to the fact you are blowing away the enemy with shotgun rounds while they take a minute to reload the muskets. Neither your allies nor enemies ever comment on the fact that you are using a weapon they have never even imagined before, and this takes you out of the game. Sure, after your trip back in time you magically appear wearing location-appropriate clothing, but you’d think wielding a 12 gauge shotgun or an automatic rifle would have at least got a comment from your allies during a pause in battle, or as you escort across the map. Putting that aside though, the story eventually spins down into your average B-movie time travel tale, as a conflict develops between you and another mysterious company trying to change history. The battles range from Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 to fighting in Pompeii as ash and fire rain down from an erupting Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. Other locations include the battles of Antietam, Tannenberg, and a German World War II POW camp. The game’s end is fairly open-ended, but by the time you get there most of the cool time-travel issues have already appeared in the game and you can only wonder where the inspiration will come from for a potential sequel.
As far as first person shooters go, Darkest of Days does a serviceable job of getting you into the action. As you play through the game, you will come across many different weapons, from both the future and the past. The only weapons that are actually fun the play with though are the futuristic weapons. They range from shotguns to assault rifles and generally handle well and do sufficient damage. Period-accurate weapons, on the other hand, are not as entertaining. Most are usually suffering from historically accurate features such as tediously slow reloading times and small clip sizes. While this is accurate, it isn’t exactly fun to play. After dispatching a ton of baddies in the previous level with a shogun, on your next trip in time you are once again given a musket and its slow reload times and small clip really drive you crazy. There isn’t much reason given to when and why you are allowed to use future weaponry, other than to “level the playing field” so that history can return to normal. All of the weapons feature a rather annoying reloading minigame. This means that if you hit the reload button at a certain part of the process, you will successfully reload and be ready to go. However, if you fail, your weapon will jam. This is again a bad game design choice – why not reward players for getting a perfect reload instead of making it a requirement? Why must your weapons jam every single time you miss a perfect reload? It’s a backwards system to that of Gears of War for example, where hitting the perfect reload allowed you to reload faster, and failing simply mean it took a regular amount of time. The whole reloading user interface also take up twice the space of your crosshairs (which are big to begin with), so you often get very distracted by the reloading minigame instead of focusing on the enemy ahead of you.
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