Darkest Of Days Game Review
SoHood.com Reviewed by: Mario Diaz
Format: Xbox 360
Game Rating: 3.0/5.0
In Darkest of Days, you take on the role of Alexander Morris, a soldier who is trying to repeal the enemies forces, under General Custer’s regiment in the Battle of Little Bighorn. You may already heard about that battle and it doesn’t end good, as you stand on a hill shooting your six shooter helplessly, minutes before his death, a futuristic time traveler warps in a bubble like shape to save you and transports you to the future.
After your life is saved, your transported into a metallic room and introduced to Mother, who you can only see her set of female eyes that appear on a large computer monitor. She goes through the whole story on why you’re here, and why you’re going back in history to find the person who invented the technology to time travel.
Your primary object is to not mess with history, as you’ll notice that some soldiers on the field have this blue aura around them, indicting that this is someone important in life and in history, so killing them is wrong. Luckily, you’ll have these magic and futuristic balls that you throw in the direct of one of those important soldiers, and it will knock them out, not kill them. Oddly, if you do kill one too many of those important soldiers, a group of time agents with high tech weapons appear to stop you, with force.
Dexter, is the one who saved you from your death, and is basically your guide, who supplies you with powerful weapons, ideas and strategy and some times a little backup. At times, he’ll be very hands on, almost a captain/general of shorts, guiding other time agents on the fly, with tactically orders.
You’ll spend a majority of your time in two eras – World War I and the American Civil War, battle it out in large maps filled with large amount of enemies and allies. One nice aspect to this is, when it comes to large amount of soldiers on screen at once, I didn’t experience any slow-downs, that’s pretty respectable.
All of the weapons utilizes the Gears of War-style active reload system, which is both good and bad, as the futuristic weapons load great, but the old- civil war ones, take too long for it to do any real effect. The old civil weapons were very strange to use at first, but in time you’ll get comfortable with it, as with the musket rifle, only capable of shooting one shot per round, really made you think about every potential shot as it takes forever to reload.
The game is a little unbalanced, in that even though your weapon is superior, you’ll still get killed a bunch of times, because your allies don’t have great A.I, they are straight bullet-catchers on the field, no sense of team work. Another thing that really got to me, was the no cover system in place, you’ll just squat down, behind a rock or object, only to have someone shoot you as if you’re not in cover. In a game with hundreds of soldiers shooting, fighting, one would think that covering yourself would have been a priority.
Overall, the game’s storyline was really something, I was looking forward to play in. Unfortunately, the end result is just disappointing, with such a huge possibility of what it could have been, with matching your more powerful and stronger weapon verses the Civil War armies, it’s a shame that the shooting mechanics and missions with long walking weren’t fine-tuned enough before it was released. But with all it’s glitches, and faults, I still managed to finish the game, because I felt that Darkest Of Days still had the right idea, and at times can be a fun and interesting game to play.
About the Game:
Published by: Phantom EFX
Developed by: 8monkey Labs
Genre: First-Person Shooter
Release Date: US: September 8, 2009
MSRP: $49.99
