Darkest of Days Review

Darkest of Days is a first-person shooter video game developed by 8monkey Labs and published by Phantom EFX. It was released in North America and Europe on September 8, 2009 for Microsoft Windows and the Xbox 360. This was the first major retail title for Phantom EFX and the brand new Marmoset that was designed by 8monkey Labs. The game introduces the player to an alternate reality, where humans have perfected time travel and are now attempting to alter the past in their favour, while others try to preserve it. Due to this setup, the game features many history-altering conditions, from future technology appearing in the past to completely out-of-place events and characters. Needless to say, for me the game failed to create a particularly immersive world, as you are constantly thrown between the future and the past, with neither perfecting the little details to make you feel engaged. Still, the gunplay and historical accuracy will likely attract some curious players, while the sci-fi twist will add some interest to the appropriate audience. The game is not very long, the story takes a while to get going, and there is no multiplayer, so I would definitely recommend trying the demo before deciding on the purchase.

In Darkest of Days, you are Alexander Morris, a soldier fighting in General Custer's army during the Battle of Little Big Horn. After Custer is killed and you are mortally wounded, a portal suddenly appears and you are taken away by a man wearing futuristic armour. You awaken in the headquarters of KronoteK, an organization that has managed to develop time travel technology and are apparently dedicated to researching and protecting history. The KronoteK boss, known as "Mother", tells you that the organization's founder has gone missing and disturbances have started appearing through history, causing individuals that have played key roles in history to be placed in danger. You are then given the obvious task of helping KronoteK restore history. This is all fine and dandy, but I felt that being a mute main character never gives you the chance to see how a person would react when he is suddenly in the future and has to take orders from a pair of women’s eyes on a large screen. For the sake of the game, you go along with the setup, but this kind of “Ok, I guess…. I’ll go with that…” feeling will come back again and again through the main story. It’s an inconvenient distraction that’s caused by some poor choices in story telling. For example, after you are rescued, pass the modern weapons training and assumingly agree to help save Cpl. Welsh from the Union Army in the American Civil War, you are still not told exactly why you were chosen. It isn’t until the 5th mission in the game that you get a choice to hear what your own motivation is. Apparently, there are many people who have gone missing during armed conflicts and are simply never accounted for. These people make great agents for KronoteK because the history will not miss them, and they are free to travel to any time period they wish. You don’t have much choice either, because should you refuse to help Mother, you will simply be sent back to your time period – which means death is again only minutes away. But as I mentioned, you are not told any of this until a few missions into the game, and the explanation is easily missed if you do not choose to talk to your sidekick before starting the next mission. So for the first few battles, I found myself very puzzled as to why I was even chosen to be saved and why I should care about the conflict around me.

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.

You can carry one primary and secondary weapon with you at all times, and you are free to pick up another type of weapon on the battlefield, though it’s usually unnecessary as ammo is plentiful and there are no real differences between the weapons. In your third item slot, you have chasers- these little balls are a future technology which allows you to knock out certain individuals in order to take them out of the battle without killing them. You will encounter many such enemies, which must remain alive for their apparent historical relevance – though you never get details as to who these folks are. If you run out of chasers (you only get 5 per level) you can always simply knock the enemy out or shoot them in the leg/shoulder. These enemies will have a blue aura around them, so they are easily spotted in battle and chasers will only attach themselves to these guys, not regular soldiers. There are quite a few escort missions as well, where the person which must stay alive is highlighted in orange. Most of the game is set in large maps, which you will have to walk across at least once to finish the level. What’s disappointing here is that often, at the end of your trip, you will not even find the historical person you are trying to save, instead this mission was apparently just to “keep the events timeline in tact”, which often feels like a misleading waste of effort on your part.

As mentioned at the beginning of this review, the game features an all-new Marmoset engine, and in fact was meant to be a demonstration of the engine at first, before being developed into a full retail title. While more competition in the game engine world is always welcome (seeing the Unreal Engine is starting to get old), I can’t say that the engine is totally ready. The graphics do not look all that impressive, aside from the water, everything looks a bit cartoonish and animations could use a lot more work. Textures are passable, and there is a lot of debris that blows across the screen, but it’s all a distraction from the low resolution rock and grass texture. The engine does have its moments though: the level maps are rather huge, and at times there are upwards of 100 NPCs running around a field, taking cover and shooting at one another. The AI isn’t particularly bright, but they do an ok job for such a large amount of calculation required. Another huge bonus of the engine are the extremely fast loading times. It takes just seconds to get into the game’s main menu, and another few seconds to load the level. On the performance side of things though, it’s a little disappointing. The game struggles to run on a medium-range machine with anything above 2x AA and a modest resolution. On the other hand though, there is not much graphical difference between 2x and 8x AA so those with lower end settings are not missing out on much. The sound is very forgettable; the soundtrack is bland and makes for good “elevator music”. The voice acting is quite poor and will often make you cringe with poor emotional display and forced dialogue. The only highlight is the weapons, which fire with satisfying effects.

Overall, it is hard to recommend the game to either Sci-fi fans or history fans because the game does neither particularly well. There are some good action sequences, huge battles and interesting history changes, but a lot of it does not feel particularly engaging because of some poor game design choices and disappointing story telling. If you tried the demo and enjoyed it, you can give the game a go, because most of the gameplay mechanics are showcased in the demo and continuously reappear in the full game. With a bit more technical polish and gameplay changes, this could have been a very fun and even engaging title. But as it stands, Darkest of Days offers a good glimpse at 8monkey Lab’s new engine to go along with some gunplay and background story, but not much else.