The Story:

The story is more robust and original than I expected from a shooter, even one with as fine a comic pedigree as The Darkness. Mixing Sopranos-style mafia drama with the century-long history of the Estacado family's struggle against the Darkness creates a rich narrative which the game uses to its fullest - even loading screens are disguised as plot devices and soliloquies: Jackie in a smoke-filled cone of spotlight, talking aloud to his girlfriend, reliving some memory of New York City, filling in details of the next plot development or just playing moodily with his twin guns. Similarly, taking the subway involves a quick pantomime of silent subway behavior that's instantly recognizable from the real world. Better than a progress bar, that's for sure.

It's no small help to the story's effectiveness that The Darkness has some of the best voice acting around, including a truly believable Jenny, Jackie's girlfriend, played by Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose. Kirk Acevedo, who played Miguel Alvarez on Oz voices Jackie himself, and former Faith No More frontman Mike Patton does a kickass job of giving voice to the Darkness, constantly narrating, berating, or encouraging Jackie as the game evolves.

The Look and Feel:

The graphics are expertly well-realized with detailed environments that, despite the overall lack of variety, are covered with realistic graffiti, signs and convenient maps - the team at Starbreeze did a great job reproducing the look, sound and feel of lower Manhattan. Since most of the game is set in my own neighborhood, it was a treat to see New York City subways reproduced with an impressively high level of realism: the tiles and grime, the sounds, even the ambient people look and slouch and curse and break-dance like real New Yorkers. Tongue-in-cheek poster advertisements and appropriately snarky information consoles round out the subway experience - and unlike the real subway, the trains in The Darkness arrive whenever you step onto the appropriate platform.

If only.

Perhaps the greatest bit of realism in the game is the presence of scattered televisions and the programs you can watch in-game, thanks to something like animated bitmaps - watch a dozen or so music videos and plenty of old TV shows: 13 episodes of Flash Gordon for instance, or full-length films like The Man With The Golden Arm. When canoodling with your girlfriend Jenny on her couch, you can watch the entirety of To Kill A Mockingbird if you like. That kind of commitment to otherwise unnecessary content is a hallmark of the many examples of ingenious world-building you'll notice as you play through The Darkness.

And those details are enhanced by the relatively small size of the game. The game's tightly-scripted storyline is kept focused by the relatively few areas the game gives you to explore. That might have been entirely without drawback if the game areas were more creatively differentiated from one another: since those parts of the game set in New York City take place in either the subway or one of a few downtown neighborhoods, it would have been wonderful to see more than the same gray, dingy urban scene over and over. For instance: besides a few storefront signs, Chinatown looks more or less exactly like the game's Lower East Side, which in turn looks a lot like Gun Hill and Grinder's lane.

Luckily, other parts of the game are set in environments wildly removed from the realistic, and offer such environmental upgrades as charred, limbless German zombies moaning in agony while continuing to fight never-ending battles in a hellish version of World War I. And doesn't an undead amputee loyal to the Kaiser brighten up just anything?

Indeed, nearly half the game takes place in a nightmare underworld where British soldiers and German shock troops wage eternal war against each other - the tension between their Frankensteinian, sewn-together faces and congenial British accents (or angry German shouts) tell as much of the story as the dialogue does.

The Gameplay:

Combat is straightforward, possibly too much so for hardcore FPS fans: a small number of firearms are available and ammo drops from nearly every enemy, but the game never even names the guns: all you've got is a picture in the menu to tell you which is which. While this isn't the worst handicap, it would be nice if the game paid a little more attention to your arsenal.

Regardless, that arsenal is enhanced by Darkness Mode, which brings out the signature dual demon heads, erects an invisible shield to protect you from the bullets of your enemies, enables Darkness Vision to make low-light environments easier to navigate, and gives you the power to consume the hearts of fallen foes - thereby raising your Darkness Level and recovering Darkness Energy. As the story progresses, active powers are added to Darkness Mode, such as the infamous Demon Arm - which smashes through or grabs heavy objects and makes fast work of the ubiquitous light bulbs that leech away your Darkness Energy. You'll also gain the Creeping Dark ability, which snakes one of your Darkness heads up walls and through narrow openings to open doors, grab ammo, or bite off bad guys' faces. It's a lot of fun to see how many hostiles you can drop while standing safely in the shadows of another room.

In fact, while the adjustable auto-aim feature and simplistic nature of the gunfighting may bore those used to more robust fragfests like Gears of War or Resistance, one of the most rewarding mechanics of The Darkness is the simple joy of destroying light sources as you creep along. At first you've only got your firearms to shatter bulbs and lamps, and there's plenty of ammo to enjoy creating as much safe shade as possible - and with the addition of the Demon Arm, light-killing becomes a fun, mostly-intuitive activity that leaves your trigger fingers free for more dual-wielding target practice. Jackie can also summon a Darkling minion (one of four) to extinguish light sources, but summoning one of the three offensive Darklings usually tends to be a more effective choice.

Jackie learns to summon four types of these impish, hysterically funny minions - in Darkness Mode, you can see strategically placed summoning portals, and it's easy to summon a melee, ranged, or kamikaze Darkling in addition to the rather ineffectual Lightkiller Darkling. These cigar-smoking, wisecracking demons follow you around, urinating on corpses and killing anyone they see. Their foul-mouthed quips provide some of the game's most entertaining moments, and there are outfits scattered throughout the environment that, once obtained, may be worn by your summoned Darklings.

It's easy to tell that the focus here is on the main storyline, which moves along at a nice clip and rarely fails to keep pace with the action. This is no shallow FPS with a bare-bones story acting merely as a framing device; it's the real deal, meaty and soulful. Side quests are available from people you meet in the subway stations, and by and large they're not that different from the main story missions: kill, retrieve, return. The side quests are fun to do, but the rewards are pathetic: collecting phone numbers to call and letters to mail is a great way to add the fun of collecting to an already addictive experience, but when I take out a group of thugs for an aging mob friend, I expect a better reward than one more scrap of paper with a telephone number. Since the numbers and letters are also found scattered throughout the world, getting one as a reward for a difficult mission seems like a bit of a cop-out. It would have been great to see a simple reward system that actually helped improve or expand Jackie's powers; as it stands, the only real reason to pursue side quests (other than a love of unlocking concept art) is the opportunity to devour the hearts of defeated enemies, thereby raising your Darkness Level.

Now if the Darkness Level was implemented with a bit more clarity, that would be a good motive, but unfortunately the Darkness Level is left a bit vague: it does palpably extend the range of your Creeping Dark and the strength of your Demon Arm, and the fact that the benefits of those upgrades are unquantified could add to the game's mystery with just a little tweaking: while raising Darkness Level does increase the power of your Darkness Shield, thus lowering the damage you take, the total lack of HUD renders that bonus a difficult one to appreciate. Also, once you first increase your Darkness Level, the notice that you've done so remains in your "inventory" (which doubles muddily as a mission log) for the rest of the game. This left me feeling like I had experience points to distribute or some other power-up choices to make, which seemed a bit odd considering that the game doesn't include any such device.

That said, by the time you're throwing cars and imploding helicopters, it's doubtful you'll still be harping on a few loose words in the pause screen.

Multiplayer exists, although it's clearly not the main focus (despite the strangely high number of multiplayer achievements in the Xbox 360 version). With an eight-man online mode that gives you options like deathmatch, team deathmatch, survivor and capture the flag, most of the standard multiplayer options exist. Although multiplayer mode robs you of Darkness Mode and its inherently cool abilities, you do gain the ability to morph from human form to Darkling form, wherein you can scamper up walls and ceilings to get the literal drop on your opponents. Not very robust and probably not the reason anyone would buy The Darkness, multiplayer mode feels more like an afterthought - and if even a little lag gets introduced into the mix, it becomes essentially unplayable.

The Wrap-Up:

I had time with both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of The Darkness, and as in the comparison video that our lovely lady Panda shared yesterday, there isn't much difference. The PS3 version does have considerably more power to throw at the game, and perhaps its effects are a mite sharper, but it lacks the achievements that 360 fans love so much. In that regard, it's a toss-up.

Overall, I found The Darkness to be a tightly-scripted and easy to play adventure with enough grit and foul language for The Godfather fans and plenty of supernatural wickedness to appease horror afficionados. The production values and the execution of the story will please most fans of the comic, although pure FPS lovers might feel a bit unimpressed by the battle mechanics, and certainly by the multiplayer features. But whichever way you lean, there's something for almost everyone to appreciate in this self-assured, artfully designed thriller.

And despite the chunky polygons on his Cher-slick long hair, Jackie Estacado is one sexy possessed, revenge-obsessed former hitman!