In this pre-Christmas season, video games are at a bit of lull. All the best games aren't going to be out for a few months, and I need some FPS action to hold me over. I recently tried out the Darkest of Days demo, and I was pleasantly surprised.
When I first watched the teaser, I thought this was one of the most ridiculous looking games I had ever seen. Using fully automatic weapons against civil war soldiers? Seriously? Well, the story goes like this... You are rolling shotgun with general Custer and the Injuns are coming out of the woodwork. You rock the old school black powder revolver and there are more natives than bullets. Just as Custer is catching arrows with his chest a large water orb pops out of nowhere and a Stormtrooper looking hero tells you to get in.
You are quickly brought up to speed with time travel technology and are now recruited to help Doc Brown and Marty protect the time space continuum. Apparently, something in time travel is all wonky and you are tasked with protecting certain individuals whose history has been changed or something.
After some basic weapons training you are sent back in time to the Battle of Antietam. The mission is to find a soldier who isn't supposed to be there, and escort him off the battlefield. You are issued a black powder rifle and Henry Repeating Rifle, and join ranks with the Union boys to blast some Rebs.
Darkest of Days has a unique reloading method. When your weapon is empty a green bar begins to form a circle around the screen that intersects a little green box. If you time your click just right, when the line hits the box, you get a quicker reload. If you miss the intersection with the box, your weapon jams and it takes extra time to fix. If you choose to skip this process altogether, your reload time is right in the middle of quick reload and jam. All in all kind of a cool feature.
Darkest of Days gets interesting when you meet up with a time travellin' buddy on the battlefields of Antietam. He gives you a futuristic full auto rifle and you cut through the Confederates like a knife through butter (oddly enough, none of your fellow Union boys question this futuristic rifle). You find the soldier needing escort and you led him off the battlefield dropping Rebs with quick three shot bursts. On your way out you are confronted with bad time travellers and get out of dodge at the last minute.
This is game is fun and completely far fetched. The full auto weapons in the wrong era are reminescent of using a better gun (with a cheat/God mode) in an old school FPS. The demo only explores a very small time period but it looks as though the full version will hit everything from the Roman times to the future.
Should you buy this game? Well, here is the rub. Although the game employs some new tricks (different eras, mixing of weapons, reloading methods) it is still a pretty generic FPS. The story doesn't seem to be amazingly compelling, yet it looks to be entertaining enough to hold my attention. If this game were to be released a few months from now I'd say forget it, but in this "dry spell" it might be worth consideration.
Darkest of Days will be available on 9/8/2009 for XBOX360 and PC. PC gamers can find the demo on Steam.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 6:59AM 
Here's the deal.... Valve, you make great games. How about you put some work into the long awaited Half Life series? Seriously it has been years! Are you guys on the Starcraft 2 schedule?!?! I suppose in the meantime we call all settle for Portal 2. The first Portal game was bundled with my Half Life purchase and affectionately called the "Orange Box". I was way more into the FPS side of things; shooting aliens and robots was way more exciting than holes in walls and jumping through them. Anywho, I know a lot of the kids are into this sort of thing, so enjoy the trailer. Maybe you'll find some cake?
