Darkest of Days (360) Review

Posted by Jordan Williams on 09.30.2009

This game is proof that truth in advertising is no longer dead.

Title: Darkest of Days
Publisher: Valcon Games
Developer: 8Monkey Labs
Genre: First Peron Shooter
Players: 1
Rated: M for Mature



In an era where the First Person Shooter is considered to be the reigning King of console gaming, you would THINK that pretty much anyone would there who would even think about putting out an FPS in this day and age would shoot for the moon in terms of polish and game play. Darkest of Days does not do that at all, the only thing that the game actively shoots for is a decent story and premise, the rest of it simply shoots for the bargain bin and various "Worst of 2009" nominations.

Darkest of Days is a Science Fiction-ish shooter that takes place during various periods of various (by various I mean 3) wars. The story behind the game is that there is a sort of policing agency that makes sure the flow of time goes the way it is supposed to go. There have caught whiff that something is going wrong and the whole timeline is getting thrown off. So they recruit its various soldiers using the M.I.A lists from the various wars in the world, meaning that these soldiers weren't actually missing in action it's just that they were recruited and never heard from again. Your particular character is plucked straight out of Custer's Last Stand and thrown smack in the middle of this conflict.

And that is where the game starts and ends in terms of being good.


Graphics

Some might try to sugarcoat this game by using it's admittedly ambitious story as an excuse, or try to be apologetic for it because it is a low budget game and they might've but a "We tried our best" attitude to it. But that does not change the fact that the graphics in this game are simply BAD. The textures, the models, the guns, the environments all look just plain horrible. At first glance this game does NOT look like a game that would be coming out on the Xbox 360 five years after it's launch, this game honestly looks like a first...MAYBE second generation Xbox (and I mean the OLD Xbox) title.

DOD’s big claim to fame with its graphics is that it allows them to put tons of enemies and other things onto the level at once, this is true. During Custer's level there will be honestly 40 to 50 fully rendered and active Native American and American Soldiers on both sides furiously fighting. This is impressive at first glance until you realize that almost every single model looks exactly the same (not even small nuances like a mustache or a beard to offer some sort of difference between the models. And on top of that a lot of them don't do much of anything besides stand around and wait to be killed, but more on that later.

Once you get past the models then you have to look at the environments. This game uses so much brown, grey, and just general dinge that it's often hard to tell what is a tree, rock, or dirt. And the levels that do have some light on them show some of the games graphical faults like unfinished polygons (there are parts of the level where you can honestly look down through the ground and see the great beyond) and probably some of the worst textures on a current-gen 360 title this year. The presentation of the game itself isn't even up to snuff. All of the text in the game is hard to read, including the pause menu text and on one level you are even forced to wear a gas mask obscures almost the entire screen, forcing you to wade through tons of muddy textured and boring looking soldiers just to get to the next checkpoint.

And one final thing, in a game where you are using futuristic weaponry in old battles, you would think you would have something more technologically advanced than a notebook paper map (which is impossible to read, by the way) as your own guide through the levels.



Game play


DOD is an FPS, this means that you are generally pointing your instrument of death at someone, pulling the trigger, and watching them die. If DOD ended there, it would be just fine. But when you take into account the downright stupid A.I, the artificial challenges, and how lame and weak most of the weapons are. You get a game that is borderline unplayable.

The A.I in this game is non-existent. There is a level where you start out doing trench warfare; your comrades are falling down around you dead as they ate being taken out from the opposite trench. However, I was simply able to climb over the trench wall, run across the battlefield and into the enemy trench. From there I proceeded to kill every enemy soldier. This is not some e-penis tale about how badass I am this is to point out that NOT ONCE DID THE COMPUTER EVER SHOOT AT ME. Not even after I stood POINT BLANK inside of ENEMY TERRITORY. This is not the only stupid A.I moment. Since every level you play is during a giant battle, you will see tons of soldiers running around...but they are doing just that.

Running around.

You might have an enemy stop and pop of a shot off (with deadly accuracy ironically) but for the most part they simply just wander around the level aimlessly and seem to only 'activate' if you shoot at them first. Your partners aren't much better seeing as there seems to be NO way to activate them at all. I have stood still once I 'activated' enemies only to watch them mow be down after about six shots while my teammates stand around and do nothing.

A.I issues aside, even the if the A.I had some sort of redeeming value it is simply lost with it's bland looking and hard to navigate levels. The map you have is utterly useless as there is no way to take a good hard look at it seeing as the map is in real time and takes up pretty much all of the screen leaving you open to being shot from God knows where. Most of the levels follow the same rule of go here, kill X amount of people, go here, kill Y amount of people. There is rarely any mission variant that you should care about, just follow the orange circle.

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The game tries to throw a challenge at you in the way of certain enemies that you are not supposed to kill. These people are apparently important to history in some way shape or form, so they need to survive. So you have to get creative and find ways to incapacitate them so they don't try to shoot you in the face. This could've been an interesting point if they didn't give you a weapon that was made for the sole purpose of knocking these High Value Targets out in one shit. If you don't want to use the weapon (which you have from the start) you can get creative and melee them or shoot them in the leg. But in the end a simple grenade can handle the problem.

Although sometimes it is funny to watch you go to great lengths to spare the life of one of the HVTS only to watch them get trampled by a horse, shot by a teammate, or exploded by a grenade. Luckily if this happens it doesn’t count against you since YOU didn't actually kill them.


Sound

The sound and music work is actually the only bright spot of the game.

That is a complete lie.

The sound and music work is actually just as bad, if not worse than the rest of the game. The music on each level is simply a 45 second loop of cliché canned "crescendo war music" and I do mean a 45 second loop. There are many parts where you run with no action and you can actually hear the track fade in and out as it loops. The voice work is passable, only because a majority of the voice work seems to be done by three people. Your sidekick, "Mother" and the foreign speaking soldiers you fight against. It's really easy to tell that the budget on this game didn't go into the sound department because even some of those futuristic weapons sound like the pea shooters you are using in the WW1 themed levels. Overall the sound quality of this game is well...yeah. Let's just say it's more of the same.



Fun Factor

Even with my bad games, I usually say you can have fun with it even if it's for a small amount...but I honestly cannot say that here. This game is simply not fun. Even during the Custer's Last Stand section you start to get a good idea of how the rest of the game is going to play out and you get an even better idea of how bad it is going to be. From there on own it's really just a downhill struggle in which you might be compelled to finish the game to see how the interesting story turns out, but the execution is fighting you at every single turn. This game could've served well as a movie, or even a book. But as a video game it is simply not fun.

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Lasting Appeal

The campaign will take about about 8-10 hours...but that is it. All of the games achievements can be earned on a single play through if you play on the hardest difficulty, and there is absolutely no multiplayer at all in the game. So really once you beat it, there is virtually no reason to ever look at the title again. Your best bet is to try forgetting you even put yourself through the punishment that is playing the game in the first place and put in a GOOD game to make it up to yourself.



The 411

Darkest of Days had ambition, the storyline and the set pieces were there. It's just the fact that none of this was executed well at all. The game play is horrible, the graphics are horrible, the SOUND is horrible. Darkest of Days might've gotten an E for effort if had polished itself up a bit. But ironically a game focusing on time travel probably would've been a lot better received if it had been released 8 or 9 years ago it would have been pushing the technology to its limits. As for right now Darkest of Days is quite possibly one of the worst games of the year.

Graphics	3.0	The models look nice...but all the same. The enviorments and textures are just flat out horrible.
Gameplay	3.0	Standard and VERY basic FPS stuff here. Mentally handicapped A.I ruin this.
Sound	2.0	Mute the damn TV.
Lasting Appeal	3.0	No multiplayer, and the story dosen't even warrant another play through.
Fun Factor	2.5	The game is too broken and unpolished to be fun, the storyline is there but the rest of the game simply is not.
Overall	3.0   [ Bad ]