In Darkest of Days, you’ll get to experience some of the most varied gameplay ever released in one title. Thigns will never get stale as you travel to distant times and fight alongside people from that time period. Fighting in Antietam (the bloodiest day of the American Civil War) feels much different than fighting on the side of the Russians at Tannenberg (where the Russians withstood 140,000 casualties in WWI).


Gameplay

Darkest of Days has a great concept, one that we have not seen in a long time. Time travelling warriors who are there to make a difference with ancient, modern and futuristic weapons is a cool concept and it should have worked completely. But it fails in a few spots, mostly the limited gameplay features such as no multiplayer, overly easy gameplay, linear or near linear levels and when you get some cool future weapons they are not with you long enough to be more than a little fun.

Playing like every other First Person Shooter you will find yourself running and gunning with a wide variety of weapons from a single shot musket, a Civil War era sniper rifle, my favorite 1800’s rifle the Henry, various World War 1 and 2 weapons as well as some futuristic shotguns, pistols, machine guns, rocket launchers and marbles. Well the marbles are used to take down important characters to history.

The game starts out with you at the Battle of Little Bighorn, which is also known as Custer’s Last Stand. You are one of Custer’s troops who are just about to be killed when a sphere appears in front of you and someone sends you through, saving you from being scalped. You find yourself in the future, not being told very much other than there is now time travel, and it is used to observe the past for the most part. But the person who invented time travel is missing somewhere in time and you are going to be used to find him and fix some problems which have happened in a few different time periods.

The game has certainly taken a chance with using muskets since the average gamer is used to having 60 shots instead of just 1 but it works. The rifle is powerful, the smoke is realistic and it lingers in the air, obscuring other targets and you cannot just spray and pray your way through difficult situations. It also switches things up when you are given a futuristic weapon to use to turn the tide of a fight or needed to rescue someone important. This is fun, especially with hundreds of troops rushing out of the corn fields and you can spray and drop a lot of them.

The futuristic weapons are similar to what we have now but with a twist for the most part. The shotgun is very similar except in look, but there are a few machine guns, pistols and sniper rifles which are certainly different. A machine gun that auto targets is very nice and a pistol which just tears up everything is also a nice treat, but one of my favorites was the sniper rifle and while it was rarely used its ability to change where you need to shoot based on target speed, wind and more is a great idea.

Earlier I mentioned marbles and while they are not actually marbles it is easy to call them that. These are literally balls you throw in the direction of glowing blue NPC’s and then attack and disable them, instead of killing them. These characters are glowing because they are important to future events in some way and if they die you will lose upgrade points for your weapons. If you are out of these magic marbles you can always just shoot these guys in the leg and since switching weapons takes a second, usually it is easier to just knee cap them and continue on.

Like I said before there is no multiplayer and that is a shame because even with standard Capture the Flag, Death Match and the like with the wide range of weapons, mixed in with thousands of years of possible battle sites the multiplayer probably would have been fantastic.


Graphics

Not for a long time have we seen a games graphics range from generic to very nice like we do in Darkest of Days. Many of the Civil War scenes look good, especially in the forests, but the graphics quality drops down noticeably during key points such as in World War 2 and Pompeii. Now yes these are minor levels compared to the rest of the game but you can see where the developers spend their time tweaking the graphics, lighting and texture work.

Level design is well done on every level except for Pompeii which I found to be terrible. The rest of the games levels had some nice fluid design with rolling hills, forests and with natural and other types of cover. There were some nice areas in the game where the attention to detail was obvious and it was nice to see.

Now where the graphics in Darkest of Days falters is in the animation department. Most of the animation looks stiff and almost robotic at times. While you probably will not care too much about the animation because the action is rather heavy and the other negative aspects of the game are much more negative, if you look for it, you will see it.

Audio

Audio wise the game is hit and miss, but where the game actually only stumbles is the voice acting and not all of the voice acting is bad. I found the two main characters you will deal with the most to have the most annoying voice acting. It sounded cliché and too rehearsed to be of any actual entertainment value, but most of the NPC’s you dealt with during your time travel were not that bad, especially the other time travelers you deal with. Darkest of Days has some very good sound effects and the music was ok, but if you were searching for a game that is impressive across the board audio wise look elsewhere.


Value

I am afraid that the overall value of this game is low because beyond playing it once you probably will not play it a second time or even give it a second thought once you have completed it. Especially with no multiplayer to speak of, the overall games value is negligible.

Bottom Line

A good concept that is fun to play to a point and in the end you probably will not play this game a second time. Buy it if you are not going to pick it apart for no reason or stay away if most First Person Games fail to even excite you.