The Darkness II NYCC Preview November 1, 2011

While at the New York Comic Con I was privileged to demo the game The Darkness II, which I have been highly anticipating for some time.  A sequel to 2007’s The Darkness for the PS3 and Xbox 360, the Darkness tells the story of Jackie Estacato, a mafia hit man who on his twenty-first birthday inherits the Darkness, supernatural powers passed on to him by his family.  With these new powers he avenges the death of his girlfriend Jenny and takes control of the Estacato crime family.

Two years later, Jackie finds himself sore, beaten, and nailed to a wall, which is exactly how the game’s demo began.  More than just the mafia are aware of the dark powers that lurk within Jackie, a Brotherhood which wishes to possess the powers within him once again have him held captive and begin to torture him with the intention to take the powers from him for their own nefarious purposes.  The demo is then presented as a series of flashbacks from that moment, which the game developers assured me are being taken out of sequence from the final version of the game.

Jackie awakes to find himself inside the fanciest restaurant in New York City.  Out of the pages of a Martin Scorsese script, the game automatically moves Jackie as the events around him progress, allowing the player to change his perspective to get a better view of whatever he’s looking at.  As he passes by all the wise guys he makes it to his table in the back and sits down, two beautiful identical twins are at the table waiting for him.  As they engage in uncomfortable small talk, one of the twins immediately gets assassinated, and a van can be seen through the window driving at a hundred miles per hour straight for the restaurant wall!

Jackie is hurt, but not out.  His right hand man grabs him and starts to drag him to safety.  With no way to protect himself during the following shootout, he hands you a gun and says to cover him while he gets you out of there.  Then the game really begins, and you need to defend yourself as waves of enemies make their way into the restaurant, practically turning it into a war zone.  One nice improvement over the previous game is that with one weapon Jackie can aim with sights, allowing for better accuracy with each shot.  Halfway through the sequence, your assistant hands you a second weapon with the hope that you can do more damage with two, and indeed you can.  No longer able to aim down the sights any more, it’s a fair trade-off, as you can now fire faster and can sustain shooting for longer without having to reload.

Jackie is dragged into the kitchen, just as a molotov cocktail is thrown into it.  Combined with a gas leak they were just smelling, the entire kitchen is engulfed in flames and Jackie is severely injured.  As Jackie views his burns all over his body, the voice of Mike Patton, who is reprising his role as the voice of The Darkness, is heard, urging Jackie to release him once again.  With the push of a button, the Darkness is released, and Jackie is at full strength once again.

The next part of the level serves as a tutorial for all the new game mechanics.  The Darkness no longer works the same way as it does in the first game, you can no longer switch powers around like you could previously, and instead you are given different capabilities with it immediately, such as the ability to slash at enemies and object.  This gives you the ability to break through barriers and can act as a melee attack.  You also have the ability to pick up object and hurl them at enemies, which the game developers likened to the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2.

We flash back to the present, and Jackie continues to be tortured by The Brotherhood.  He is taunted by his failure to save Jenny, and his inability to control the Darkness.

The game then switched to the New York City Subway.  Previously serving as strictly a hub world in the first game, the subways were now filled with enemies gunning for Jackie and his powers.  It is at this moment the player is made aware that Jackie’s weakness is light, and it is imperative that he destroy all the artificial lights in the subway tunnels or else he could fall more susceptible to gunfire.  However, Jackie was not alone anymore.  His friend, the Darkling, was assisting him through the subway, jumping on enemies to distract them and spouting insane statements.  The game developers promise that this new game is unlike the previous as it is treating the Darkling in a whole new way.  The Darkling, as previously depicted, were spawned minions which had different special options.  They would die easily but could be just as easily respawned.  Now, there is only one Darkling and he has a whole new personality.  The game developers assured me that they wanted us to have an attachment to the little guy, and let me tell you, I was feeling attached.

The game faded to white once again and we were snapped back to the present.  As he continued to be tortured, I thought for a moment that the big bad may succeed at taking the Darkness from Jackie, but you can’t keep a powerful hero down.  Amassing his last bits of strength (as well as a quick button press), Jackie was able to free himself from his constraints and upon killing the lights in the room, use the Darkness to save himself.  As the big baddie sulked away in failure and fear, he promises he will return, and “visit his Aunt Sarah.”

That sentence lingering in the air, the demo ended.

I couldn’t be happier about the progress with The Darkness II.  After having seen it previously at E3 earlier this year, I was treated to a whole new section of the game which has impressed me even stronger than the last time I saw it.  The game is inspired by a comic book property of the same name, and from the looks of it, that comic series is being done with the utmost of respect, and should expose a ton of gamers to the comic series, just as the first game had exposed me to it back in 2007.

The Darkness II is coming Feb, 2012 for Xbox 360, PC and PS3.