The Darkness II demo is available for download (XBLM).

Two Notes:

1. It is violent. There is blood everywhere. There are limbs everywhere. There will be copious amounts of brow-furrowing and face-scrunching from both player and audience.

Good. Now that we’ve sorted that out.

2. It is superb. Its plays well with combat feeling weighty and impactful. It also corrects a nagging flaw of the original. The Darkness is a comic about a hitman who gains control over an army of satanic creatures. In the game you wielded your considerable power over a mashup of Soprano-esque goons. However, in a very strange omission not a single opponent reacted to the demons frolicking about. Your enemies treated you like an irate milkman. While a wonderful game, this put a large dent in immersion.

If the demo is evidence then this issue has been fixed with vigor. Enemies attack with bravado. You return the favor. One is shot. The other is torn very literally in half. Another is impaled by a light fixture you tore from the ground.

The fourth turns and runs away.

The fifth simply curls into a ball asks you to spare him.

This creates immersion. The feeling of steering a being controlling powers of evil we cannot fathom. And that same man engaging 5 to 6 thugs who are being paid in free meals off the books. The separation in constitution and motivation is made painfully obvious at every opportunity.

Simply put if this era of gaming is remembered for games that maintain quality while retaining the look and feel of the source material (Rocksteady’s Batman series, Transformers: War for Cybertron, Ghostbusters, etc.) then early reports suggest we will be throwing the Darkness II on said pile.

If any of these words raise an eyebrow then a sampling of the Darkness II is definitely worth the time.

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