After doing some searching for some good games to review, I came across 8monkey Labs’ newest title, Darkest of Days. I’d never heard of these guys before, as this title is to be their first big release game on both the PC and the Xbox 360. The basic idea is that time travel is now possible and there is some rogue group attempting to change history, so you’ve got to go back and ensure that it doesn’t happen. It kind of reminds me of the 90s TV show, TimeTrax, with Darien Lambert busting time traveling criminals. Anyway, I really enjoyed this game, especially your extremely vulgar counterpart Dexter, whose profanity would put the Angry Video Game Nerd to shame.
The game begins in the Battle of Little Bighorn where you, Andrew Morris, are one of General Custer’s soldiers about to get slaughtered by a horde of Indians. Right before you die, a portal opens up and you are grabbed by a member of KronoteK, the company responsible for time travel in the future. It is revealed that you were to become an MIA whose body was never to be found. You are a perfect candidate for policing time travel, as you are essentially a ghost in time.
From here, we find that someone is tampering with historic battles in the past and that certain people are dying that are not supposed to die. So you’re sent back in time to rescue the people in danger. Things start to get pretty intense when you run into the rogue agents that are trying to change the past.
You’ll get to take part in many famous historical battles from the Civil War, World War 1, World War 2 and even ancient Pompeii. Something I found pretty cool was that in the same battle, you may return to it and play on the opposing team. So in one level you play as the Russians and destroy a bridge, and later come back as the Germans and watch yourself destroy the same bridge, and then carry out additional instructions for the opposing side.
I think that the story is the greatest aspect of Darkest of Days. It really keeps you hooked as you try to figure out what the heck is going on. There is also a huge cliffhanger at the end assuring us of a sequel.
Darkest of Days took me about 10 hours to complete on the normal difficulty setting. The game is only single player, but I don’t think it would make much sense to implement a multiplayer. Fortunately the game play is so fun that you’ll want to come back and play through it again.
You are going to have a wide variety of levels to play through including lush forests, snowy death camps, and wide-open plains, and every level is huge and relatively open to explore. You also have a huge variety of weapons to use throughout your journey. To not give yourself away to the locals, you have to use weapons from the time period, that is, until things start to get crazy. When you need to take care of business, you are given a modern assault rifle, futuristic sniper rifle that calculates wind and trajectory for you, and even this big mofo! I thought this was the most fun part of the game. It was hilarious mowing down hundreds of enemy soldiers with the modern weapons.
Not everything here is completely original though. Both the health system and the reload system are nearly identical to that of Gears of War. There are only 13 achievements in the game, which are mainly achieved by completing the game. There are some funny ones though, like 100 points for killing a horse by punching it in it’s face.
I’ve always enjoyed first person shooters, and Darkest of Days does that very well. There are just TONS of soldiers running around on the screen at a time so you always have lots to shoot at. Luckily wars aren’t one-sided and you have a whole army of relatively smart AI running alongside you.
Something interesting to point out is that in every major battle, there are always survivors. These people are indicated on your screen with a blue aura, and you must not kill them or it’s game over. Luckily, you are given a handful of chasers, which are little flying balls that will render these soldiers unconscious if thrown at them from a short distance. If you run out of chasers, you’ll have to get a bit more creative to take these soldiers out.
Something that annoyed me while playing was the extremely long loading times if you die, and I died a LOT. It wasn’t uncommon to wait through a 45 second loading screen only to be insta-gibbed upon starting back up. You also aren’t allowed to save the game on your own, and you can only have one active saved game on your hard drive. There is an auto-save system built in that is pretty good, but it only saves the past 20 or so checkpoints, so you can’t go back and reply older levels without completely restarting the game.
Darkest of Days is running on a proprietary engine built by 8monkey Labs that can support up to 300 characters on the screen at a time. This is revolutionary and it really makes the battles feel very epic. You actually feel like you are a part of the historical wars of the past. On the downside, the frame rate really suffers pretty badly from this sometimes and I know that this will really bother a lot of players.
Along the same lines, the graphics actually look pretty good most of the time, but aren’t as impressive as those generated by the Unreal Engine 3. The draw distance is not very good on the 360, as the sky and distant trees look pretty bad. I’m actually curious as to how a beefy computer would handle it over the Xbox 360s dated hardware.
Other than that, the game is very beautiful. The majority of the time the game runs great and the environments look gorgeous. The background music is fully orchestrated and at most times really intensifies the battle.
There aren’t any pre-rendered cut-scenes, which is a drag, so you’ll have to settle for game-rendered cut-scenes where the lips don’t really sync up with the voices. On the other hand, the voice acting is fabulous, especially Dexter.
Darkest of Days isn’t without its problems; the frame rate jerkiness can be a real hassle sometimes. Luckily the story and game play are fun enough that you can usually look past this. I couldn’t put this down once I started playing it. I loved the fact that I felt like I was really part of the historical battles, even if I was carrying a beefed up automatic recoil-less shotgun. If the quality of this game is any indication of what 8monkey Labs is capable of in the future, we should all be very excited to see what lays down the road. The $50 price tag might be a little steep for only 10 hours of single player content, but I’d certainly recommend at least renting this one unless you’re a big first person shooter or history buff.
