Darkest of Days Review

So a little back story is in order for this review. I first heard about Darkest of Days from a PC Gamer preview and later from the PC Gamer podcast. The initial preview seemed to have good things to say about this time travelling FPS where you were able to fight in epic battles throughout history – starting at the civil war. “Wow”, I thought… “WW2 shooters are overplayed, I’ve never fought in the civil war, this game might be sweet”. I talked to Scott about blogging a review and he had never heard of the game. Here I was talking up some hype and he heard nothing about it. A few days pass and he reports that I shouldn’t bother, that some gaming news site gave DoD a 30% or some laughable score. I was disappointed, and dropped any intentions of ever playing the game. A few days later, he reported that PC gamer had given the game a great review and maybe there truly was something great about the game that the other reviewer missed. What a perfect opportunity for our first review….

Click "Read more!", below, to continue on to the full 3 page review:


Install/Tutorial:
Excited at the possibility of this being a B-level game instead, I quickly installed it. First let me say, that I love FPSs – I’ve played through tons of them. The game begins by throwing you right into the game play. Indians running all over on horseback, you and group of 20 or so other men picking them off, as they circle in. I’ll skip the details of the storyline here so that I don’t introduce any spoilers, but basically you are about to die and are brought into the future through a portal that opens on the battlefield. Once you ‘come to’ you are greeted by a computerized contact on an LCD screen and a cowboy. You are thrown into a tutorial level where you are shown the basics of firing a couple weapons, mounted gun, and grenades at some dummy targets. This is where I became skeptical of the polish. Throwing grenades seemed to have 3 frames of animation and the grenades seemed to appear 10-20 feet away from your character when they left your hand, there was no real curve/lobbing to these grenades – the physics seemed off and the implementation seemed cheesy.

Graphics:
When I dove into the first level, I was slightly disappointed with the graphics; they seemed to have low polygon counts and a lot of hard lines. The terrain and the trees don’t feel lush or flowy, it feels more like trees and set pieces are randomly dropped to the ground from a helicopter flying over the landscape (I know it sounds weird, but I can’t explain it any better). The perspective always seems off too, almost like your character is 8-10 feet tall compared to the set and the rest of the characters. Player models and landscapes seemed pretty dated even at full settings and full Phys-x physics (which surprisingly ran great on my dated system – Core 2 Duo 2.6 2GB ram 8800GTS). The phys-x is pretty on cannon and artillery explosions, but bodies ragdoll-sliding down hills and steps is glitchy and over-done to the point of being cheesy.



Guns:
There are a lot of ‘period accurate’ guns in the game - muskets, revolvers, sniper guns, mounted cannons – you get the idea. This is off-set by the cheesy futuristic advantage of hand carried laser guided artillery volleys, 70 round clip assault rifles guns, 20 round clip automatic assault shotguns, and probably a whole bunch of other guns I didn’t care to play long enough to see. Reloading causes a mini-game of timing ala Gears of War. I was quickly bored of it, and several of the guns seemed to reload about the same speed by skipping the mini-game all together. All of the guns seemed to shoot straight and accurate when in the zoomed-in view – something that slightly surprised me about shooting a musket.
ProTip: Guns continue to reload when they’re not selected. I found myself ditching my weak and low ranged sidearms for two rifles and then load switching them. When one runs out of ammo, hit reload and switch guns – rinse and repeat.

Levels/Game play:
The game suffers from poor level design. While trying to give you the sense of an open-ish world instead of a shooter-on-rails, the game gives you a gigantic map/compass and objectives that you have to walk for 3-5 minutes to arrive at. I think this is supposed to give you the opportunity to take in the scenery and keep an eye out for patrols – maybe it’s just me but I was not emerged (see graphics problems above). Instead, I found myself running to my objectives by holding down Tab (map), Shift (run), W (move forward) – and then letting go of the combo when a red target appeared in front of me on the map. I could choose to wander around near aimlessly or push to my objectives in map mode. I think that an overhead map would have made the game more immersive. Speaking of shooter on rails, there were several occasions in the game (like a 30 second walk through a cornfield in the battle of Antietam) where I walked up to a group of soldiers, and then my character was LITERALL put on rails and I was forced to look around helplessly while he strolled with a group of other soldiers – not exciting, not immersive, and gave a below c-level feel to the game.



There is a reward mechanic in the game whereby you are supposed to protect certain important historical characters from dying so as to protect the future to allow it to occur correctly. For this, the game provides these little seeker balls that I referred to as bees. You start a level with a handful of them that fly out and swarm the important market targets – when you right-click you trigger a stun on the target, knocking him unconscious and recalling the bees back to your hand. Based on the number of these marked guys you spared killing (I learned that running past them or meleeing them also works) you get reward points to purchase upgrades for your primary and secondary guns (Clip size, Reload time, Aiming, Firing Rate). What the game doesn’t tell you is that the “bees” are finite and very limited. I learned this on the 3rd level when I was forced to run up and melee groups of 3 or 4 of these marked guys after my bees had run out. It’s frustrating that they didn’t tell me to rely on them sparingly.



There is a point on the 2nd or 3rd level where you are given a futuristic machine gun to take down a line of enemy troops. I remember when I originally heard of the game and thinking that this would be one of the most exciting parts of the game. IT WASN’T. I felt like I had a level with god mode on. I had a 70 round machine gun against guys who took 8-10 seconds to reload a musket. No idea how the developers thought this would be fun. I am a seasoned FPS veteran and I was playing on hardest difficulty. This might be fun for someone who is new to FPSs (read casual gamers) or someone who needs a major self esteem boost. I found it laughably lame, unfulfilling, and not at all challenging.




Overall:
Cut scenes are crappy. Level stories are boring. The premise feels like Jean Claude Van Damme Time Cop – a B-movie concept at best. Your ‘guide’/partner is annoying and takes the player out of place by mocking the foreign languages of others on the battlefield (bad attempt at comedy). The levels designs are dull and boring, except maybe the scripted-ish events. The AI loves to hug bushy trees causing you to switch from your immersive period guns to your assault shotgun to blanket the bush/tree with bullets. Overall I would say that I had to push myself to get through the 5 levels of the game I felt I needed to give it an accurate review (it wasn’t worth continuing to play). The only thing I liked about the game was the nostalgia of visiting epic historic battlefields. It turned out to be more painful to play than the reward of viewing battlefields was worth.

Note: I made the intro pic for this review in MS paint, because I feel like it was what the game deserved.

Highs – Low requirements, Phys-x support!, Time-cop without Van Damne, Ego-boosting game play (using automatic weapons in the civil war requires no skill), loads quickly (yeah I’m reaching here).
Lows – Too many to list
Score – Painful to play through 55/100

-Rob