Darkest of Days is a new First-Person Shooter from 8monkey Labs. It has some real nice polish on it, and the story grabs you right from the start. The game drops the player in the middle of Custer’s battle at Little Bighorn, taking on the role of Alexander Morris, one of history’s MIA soldiers. Just before death, Morris is snagged by an agent of Kronotek, who whisks him forward in time to the headquarters of the organization, where he learns that it will now be his job to help police the timeline for changes. He and his veteran partner, Dexter, are put in charge of two cases right away, both involving the rescue of specific soldiers from specific historical wars: One from the American Civil War and another from World War I.
Darkest of Days has a lot more atmosphere than most “historical” FPS games. Many of these games, are, to put it bluntly, boring. They either get so caught up in historical detail that the game itself gets bogged down in it, or they drop so much of the history by the wayside that a player is constantly scratching their head over what is even going on. This game uses a neat Sci-fi bracketing story as a way to move the pace of the game up a notch, and mixes it up by allowing the player to use futuristic weaponry in historical environments (sometimes). The overall effect is enjoyment of the historical setting without sacrificing verisimilitude.
Some missions allow for futuristic weapons to be used.
Pursuit
Unfortunately, there is not much variety to the missions. In nearly every mission the scenario is the same: Go back to a point in the war dressed and equipped as one of the soldiers, blend in with the soldiers and locate the one that needs to be rescued. There are a few exceptions to this format, but expect that scenario for all but a few of the dozen or so missions. A few more different time periods to visit would also have been fun, but I guess something needs to be left for the sequel.
That being said, each of the missions was interesting, and each contained some element that made it unique from the others. For example, in the level “Harvest of Carnage” which takes place during the Battle for Antietam, There is a great scene in which Morris is walking side-by-side with Union soldiers, helping to sweep a cornfield free of Confederate soldiers. It does a good job of driving home the point that you’re just one soldier in a large army. The soldiers around you are just as effective at shooting down the enemy, you’re only helping, you’re not the hero.
In fact, trying to be a hero is an effective way to get yourself killed in this game. The best strategy usually ends up being one of blending in, and doing what the other troops are doing. Follow the orders of the commanders in the field, and try to get your real mission done along the way. Running in with guns blazing to take the enemy forces on all alone is a fatal mistake almost every time.
Take on the Confederate army with Union soldiers at your side. This situation would be too dangerous to takle alone.
To add some spice to the potentially bland flavor of killing people over and over, there a dozen or so men in each level who are marked by your HUD as historically significant. They show with a blue hue around them, and killing them is a bad thing, so you need to either avoid them, wound them, or knock them out to keep from losing your historical accuracy bonus points at the end of the level (which you can use to upgrade your weapons).
Some enemy soldiers are historically signifigant, and must be taken out non-lethally.
There are a few interesting mechanics in the game that merit discussion. First, the designers chose to make the player’s guns very accurate in every time period. It would make sense if the weapons you were sent back with were just accurate version of the period’s guns, but even when you pick up enemy guns in the field, they are crazy accurate. I was frequently head-shotting Confederate soldiers at over a hundred yards with a Henry rifle, from the hip. Now, I may not be enough of a historical buff to catch any other historical inaccuracies there may have been in the game, but I know that Civil war area, general issue rifles were not that accurate. I understand that if it were more realistic, it would probably be very frustrating to try to shoot anything, but if you’re looking for historically accurate aiming, you wont find it here.
Then there is the reload ring. This is a unique mechanic that I think really worked for this game, and I hope I get to see similar systems appear in other games in the future. Here’s how it works: When you reload (either because you just shot the last bullet in the clip or because you hit the reload command), a ring appears around the cross hairs to show you the progress. You could just let that ring fill up, and be reloaded, or you could try to time a quick reload. There is a green box on the reload ring. If you click the trigger again while the progress is passing over that box, the reload finishes very quickly, but if you miss, and click outside the box, the gun gets jammed, and the reload time seems to double. I thought it added a fun extra dynamic to the firefights, and in the early levels of the game, I even found myself reloading more than necessary, just to try for the quick reloads. Getting good at this aspect of the game is especially important at the times when the only weapon you have available is a musket.
Click at the right moment to get a fast reload.
Player health was also handled in a way that worked very well with the style and the other mechanics of the game: there are no hit points and no health packs. If you get shot, the screen gets a bit red, and if you get shot too many times in a row, your character dies, but if you manage to get out of the line of fire for a few seconds, the red fades, and you’re good as new. I like this mechanic for a couple of reasons: It gives a sense of urgency to retreat under fire: If you are being shot, you need to find cover right away. Other games allow you to employ the occasional tactic of just absorbing bullets at the expense of hit points, as long as the job gets done, but this doesn’t work in Darkest of Days, as just a few bullets in quick succession will drop you. It also eliminates the need to ever search for a health pack, arguably one of the most boring parts of any FPS.
Finally, I want to tell you about the glass walls. This was the only employed mechanic that I was truly disappointed by. The glass walls are everywhere. The missions are extremely linear, and while there is the occasional opportunity to choose whether to skirt the enemy or fight it, you are stuck to a very specific geographic path for most of the game. I like to employ sneaky tactics wherever possible in any combat oriented game, but here I was literally thwarted at each turn. Dozens of time throughout the game, I would look at my map, and see what my objective was, and find that I couldn’t go the way I thought was best. I want to wade through the creek instead of following the road to the bridge, or I want to climb a hill to get a good sniper vantage on the base before I go in. When I try to do these things, I run into glass walls in every direction that the story doesn’t specifically send me in. I understand the desire to control the story, but there is too much of it in this game.
The game is a little short (maybe 15-20 hours depending on how you play), and there is little replay value due to the linearity of the individual missions. There is no multi-player, but it doesn’t need it, and I can’t think of a way it could have really worked without just making a totally different game.
Panorama
All of the graphics are crisp and clean. On my mid-line system, I was able to run it at full graphics level easily, and never seemed to have any slowdowns, even with hundreds of actors on the screen. Each of the time periods was visually distinct, and there was enough variation in the actor’s faces that I never felt like I was just fighting endless clones of the same soldier.
The view used some motion blur when turning quickly, which I approve of, and there were lots of HUD effects going on: Whenever you are injured or running, the screen blurs a bit at the periphery, and the firefights could get disorienting at times, even if you weren’t getting shot, since the screen would shake and blur whenever explosions went off nearby. An indicator that let you know when there was a grenade nearby was also a nice touch.
As I said, I can’t be a very good judge of the historical accuracy of the game, but the settings were at times picturesque, and they were always convincingly authentic to a person who has only ever seen the places in movies and other games. The maps (which you accessed by holding out in front of you in place of your weapon) seemed to be based on real battlefields, and the missions all took place around actual, turning-point battles, like Sunken Road and Frankenau. Seeing these places through a soldiers eyes, and participating in these recreations would be a real treat for any war history buff.
All the scenery is well constructed and believable.
Noise
The music was appropriate and non-repetitive, but a lot of the voice acting was awful. The main characters were on par for a video game–they were fine–but the supplemental stuff, such as the voices of the other soldiers in the field (especially in the early Civil War missions) sounds like the performers were reading from a script they’d never seen before, and were making no attempt to put anything into. You know that tone that grade-school kids use when forced to read aloud in class? That what the Union Soldiers sound like most of the time.
All of the effects in the field were good, however. You can often tell what is going on around you from the sounds of the guns, as they all sounded a bit different. Then when bombs go off right next to you the disorientation is aided by a few moments of silence followed by a few moments of ringing in your ears before the sounds of battle return. It was nicely done, and added to the energy and urgency of the battles.
Reins
The controls were smooth and customizable, par for the course with the exception of one issue mentioned in the Encoding section below. There was the option in the controls menu to play with an Xbox 360 controller, which is nice for those who are more used to console gaming.
The Barracuda is a unique sniper rifle with a supernatural range. Choose a target, and it tells you where to shoot to compensate for distance and wind.
Encoding
No obvious bugs or errors in the sections of the game that were marked as release complete, but there were a couple of notable omissions of technical features from this game. There was no option to map fourth or fifth mouse buttons to commands. Perhaps it just wasn’t working with my mouse, but I’m used to using button 4 as my “zoom” button, and it took some getting used to to use something else. The other thing was a lack of any manual save. The game auto-saves at key points, and that’s all the saving you get. Not really a bad thing, as the auto-saves were very close together, but worth noting.
Last Word
The Darkest of Days is a well-polished, fun game with some unique and interesting features. It should appeal to lovers of time-travel stories, and those who make a hobby of military history. The historic locales and weapons manage to seem authentic without being pushy. Overall, it’s a fun single-player FPS for which the biggest complaint is that the script for the story is sometimes allowed to take precidence away from the player’s chosen tactics.
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