Customer Reviews

Darkest Of Days

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

A first-person shooter that uses Time Travel as its main gimmick, Darkest of Days is a solid game with a lot of potential that never quite gets around to really exploring it.

The game casts you as one of General Custer's cavalrymen at Little Bighorn. After the famous ambush is sprung and your fellows are cut down, an armored soldier bursts from a time portal and rescues you from certain death. Erased from history and saved from your fate, your role becomes that of a time policeman. In the actual game, this means you alternate between going back between two main time periods: the Eastern Front of World War I, and the Battle of Antietam in the American Civil War. There isn't really a far-reaching time travel aspect; those time periods are basically all you get to see.

The game's gunplay handles pretty well. You use a lot of period weaponry to maintain your disguise as a denizen of that time; in the Civil War, you're using muskets and revolvers, while in World War 1 you have more powerful bolt-action rifles. However, you also have the option of using future weapons, when you can get them; the rarity of these weapons shows their power, as an assault rifle or shotgun can make a battle much easier than it would normally be. Oddly, though, nobody ever notices you using these weapons, which makes one wonder why the Time Police bother to send you in the past with historically accurate weapons.

Your mission objectives range from the linear ("go forward, attack enemies at this location") to the open-ended ("sneak around and plant locator beacons in a German camp"). The game does a good job with atmospheric stuff; forests and cornfields are dense and give feelings of being in a tightly-enclosed area where enemy attacks can happen at any moment. The actual battles are pretty cover-intensive, too, primarily when you have primitive weapons. Using Civil War-era guns means that you have to reload very often (after every shot in the case of muskets), so finding cover is an important part of the game. There is an active reload system similar to Gears of War that allows for faster reloading (and your gun jams if you screw it up), so reloading isn't entirely tedious.

One of the only Time Travel-related gameplay points is the existence of Important People. These are otherwise normal enemies who have blue auras around them; this aura means that killing them will upset the timestream, and therefore you must shoot to wound (hitting either the arms or legs). If you avoid killing these people, then you will end up with more upgrade points to increase weapon stats. However, if you do kill those people, rival time-travelers will use the distortion of time to find you and try to kill you. Killing these enemies, though, will allow you to take their futuristic weapons for your own use. Therefore, if you're in a pinch, they can serve both as a handy armory and a nasty enemy.

The graphics are okay, but not great. They look a few years outdated, but not in such an obnoxious way as to detract from the game as a whole. The sound is pretty good in some respects (gunshot noises, environmental noises) and not so great in others (voice acting).

On the whole, Darkest of Days is a decent game - not great, not revolutionary, but pretty well made overall. The time travel thing doesn't get used as much as it ought to, but it provides some interesting levels, at least. The most annoying part of the game, though, was the fact that before and after every mission you're trapped in an unskippable cutscene where a computer screen talks at you. These sequences, reminiscent of similar ones in Half Life 2, belied the fact that the story was actually pretty one-dimensional, and mission briefings were unimportant due to the fact that your map just tells you where to go and what to do.

As a whole, Darkest of Days gets a 7/10.

Developed by 8monkey Labs and published by Phantom EFX in 2009, Darkest of Days is a FPS that takes the player through time where you fight in historic battles in efforts to save key individuals from certain death. Battles cover various time periods including the Great Sioux War, American Civil War, World War I, World War II and even during the fiery destruction of Pompeii. You take the role of Alexander Morris, a soldier fighting with General Custer during the Battle of the Little Bighorn. During the battle you're wounded but suddenly are rescued by futuristic military forces for reasons unknown. Later when you awake you find yourself in the headquarters of Kronotek, an organization which has developed time travel technology and has dedicated themselves to researching and protecting history. For reasons unknown you've been recruited by Kronotek travel through history in efforts to correct recent disturbances that have begun to happen in the world's timeline. Here are my thoughts on Darkest of Days;

Pros

+ Realistic period piece guns are nice to look at and have some great after effects like smoking barrels and firing clouds.

+ Your character can sprint quite fast to avoid being shot, although he will tire eventually.

+ Game is historically/geographically educational even though the story is largely fictional.

+ While time travel is rather common in shooters the idea is rather unique in this game.

+ Gears of War style reload reward system.

+ Futuristic weapons were extremely fun to use, especially against severely under armed period opponents.

+ Final levels of the game were excellent! Specifically the Pompeii and German Concentration Camp levels.

+ Large scale battles with immense amounts of enemies/allies on the screen at once were fun to see. It really drew you into the game.

Cons

- Limited environmental movement in areas that look completely open. Too many invisible walls. Very frustrating when you trying to run from enemies gunfire or reach your objective from another angle.

- Bland voice acting.

- Some mediocre graphics.

- Poor AI.

- Non-stop chatter and yelling of enemy/ally soldiers gets old fast.

- Repetitive environments. The majority of the game takes place in hilly forests or flat open fields.

- Near silent footfalls while running from your character or the NPCs. Yet you make normal noise when you run through water or rows of corn.

- Convoluted story.

- Mother's voice is awfully annoying.

- Agent Dexter's overuse of profanity feels forced at times as do his bizarre analogies.

- Civil War period is too heavily used. Using a one shot rifle becomes tiresome quickly.

I was very unsure of this game at the start as historical period games can really be hit or miss with me. Some of the missions begin to feel repetitive along with the environments, especially during the Civil War period. However, as the game continues things pick up a bit and the fun factor increases. At the end of the game during the Pompeii levels I was having an absolute blast and marveling at the landscape, fleeing people and events that were unfolding around me. I just kept thinking, "Why couldn't the rest of the game have been this entertaining?" But alas, it wasn't. Darkest of Days wasn't a bad game by any means and for the most part it was fun to play through despite its repetition. If you're a fan of historical period shooters it may be worth your while to check out.

What made me attracted to this game was the prospect of mass infantry battles, mainly the civil war era with musketeers. I wasn't dissapointed with that part, but everyone else is downhill.

NOTE: CONTAINS WEAPON SPOILERS

Pros

-Epic battles, especially the Civil War era battles. My favorite part had you walking in line towards the enemy and firing at the enemy line. So, so epic. Reminds of Empire Total War in FPS.

-Using future weapons to kill enemy troops using muskets. Yeah, pretty rigged xD

-Part with a portable artillery rocket launcher. Didn't come with instructions and let me thinking I was being shelled on by the enemy when it was my own rockets. Once I figured it out, it was a blast to use.

-Shooting Germans with the maxim gun as they pour out of the woods. Epic.

-Frickin' shooting a wall of Roman LEGIONAIRES with SWORDS and SHIELDS with an automatic shotgun.Doesn't get more hilarious than that.

Cons

-Biggest gripe ever: crappy A.I. I cannot stress this enough. Once I accidentally slipped into a trench and was faced with like 9 soldiers just sitting there staring into space like they were mentally retarded or something. Meleed them all down and had zero resistance. WTF?? I don't recall the union sending idiots to battle.

-Repetitive at parts. Mainly the parts where you just walk to x location and shoot y amounts of people to win.

-Bad death animations. One part you fire a cannon at massed infantry. It looks like they just decided to lie down and take a break instead of dying.

-Future battles were EXTREMELY boring. Way too hauntingly similar to CoD except with dumbed down combat mechanics. Pretty much just plot filler than something of interest.

Conclusion
This game had so much potential. Add multiplayer, like 50v50? Then some pople would buy it just for the multiplayer....The game seems capable of supporting that many units. I suppose the game semi-justified its pricetag. Introduced an interesting concept, but failed at making it shine as brightly as it could've.

This is a purely incredible game. The graphics are higher than average, although at times your graphics card WILL overheat.
The plot is better than most games. It's no half-life 2 to be sure, but it's better than crysis.
The A.I. is actually quite good. I have yet to see it "slip up" in any way.
As a matter of fact, my only real complaint would be that you ARE limited to 5 different battles that you keep returning to. It's interesting-- that's no problem -- but I feel that there should have been more scenarios. Maybe the cold war or something set in 2075 or something along those lines...
There is NO malware of any kind. Yes, it installs software for support for the game engine, but that's all. And I KNOW some half-retarded hillbilly's going to say it will hack your computer and spread you passwords to every site on the web, as well as telling everyone you exact location. IT WON'T.
All in all, on a scale of one to 10, this gets a solid 9 and three quarters.

Also, as a warning for you modders, I have yet to find a editor for this game.

Darkest of Days Important; Go to [...] for Darkest of Days first Patch for game to play properly or you will be very disapointed When you get on the Air ship and keep getting killed with no way out. Other wise i'm liking this game. I do recommend this game. I Love it.

I won't go into the basics of the game--there are other reviews for that. This seems to be a game that some people enjoy, while other people really hate it. For example, some people really like being able to wield muzzle-loading rifles that take several seconds to load, but other people find it boring (though to some extent you can improve your guns between missions, including the reload rate). There are a thousand plot holes, like how sometimes you'll be given a period-specific weapon and other times you'll be given a futuristic weapon with no explanation (and how no one in the Civil War notices that you have an assault rifle), but that seems to be true of any game or movie involving time travel--you pretty much have to accept it and have fun. The AI will say the same thing over and over, and the constant references to 9-11 are tacky, so again you have to ignore it. I didn't find the AI to be much worse than in other modern games--yes, sometimes they'll stare off into space, but other times they'll hit you hundreds of meters away, when you're behind bushes and should be unseen. The combat itself works rather well--the standard assault rifles handle as they do in other games, and the older weapons behave as you would expect (the Civil War colt revolver in particular has a nice kick to it). Though other reviewers have mentioned it, I didn't have any framerate problems. The maps tend to be wide open with lots of troops, so I can see why the graphics look dated, even though I'm not convinced a more mainstream engine couldn't have been used. The game kind of feels like an advertisement for the new engine, like they're showing off the different kinds of locations, weapons, and types of combat possible.

This is not a well-established franchise, and I like how the developers are thinking outside the box--they get points in my book for doing something new and original. The inexperience of the developers shows, but that said the game is unique--after all, how many games let you fight in first person in ancient Rome? I just wish I could've used a gladius (Roman sword)--a flamethrower against Roman soldiers isn't much of a challenge. :) This game will appeal to history buffs and people who are bored with the standard fps genres (WWII and modern times), but won't appeal to people who care a lot about graphics or the plot making sense. Most people won't put this at the top of their 'best game' list, but it definitely has a lot to offer.

Pros:
Good variety of weapons and map locations
Linear and nonlinear maps
Runs fine (for me at least)
Goes where no fps has gone before

Cons:
Dated (but not terrible) graphics
Lots of plot holes
Bad dialogue
Poor AI at times

I was skeptical about a game that has such bad packaging artwork (and a clumsy title) but it turned out to be a lot of fun. The graphics aren't top notch but they aren't distracting either, and an effort was made in numerous places to add detail. Voice acting was often hokey but somehow endearing at the same time. What I liked most were the unusual settings -- Civil War, Pompeii -- and the old weaponry. (Fighting with a muzzle loader brings a whole new appreciation for the battle tactic of simply turning tail and running for cover until you can reload!) Nice sprinkling of futuristic weapons and enemies to keep you on your toes. It's not a sophisticated game but parts of it (ie Civil War infantry advancing and getting swarmed, regrouping and forging ahead) somehow gave me more of a feeling that I was in a real battle than many of the more polished shooters out there.

The ending practically screamed 'SEQUEL!" which I'd love -- more time periods would be a blast -- but I don't think response to this game was favourable enough which is a shame. I'd buy a sequel for sure.

Overall: 8.5/10

got the game for a good price and it was pretty cool.good shooter with that time traveling/modern weapon thing working pretty well.could have been more choices of time eras but killing rebs and romans with sub machine guns was pretty fun.

Brilliant concept, so-so execution. First of all the graphics are very sub-par for today's standards yet the thing still manages to lag like crazy on my phenom II x3 710, 9800gt 1gb, 4gb ram system. I know my rig isn't the top of the line but it can handle games that are much more graphically intense than this without a hiccup. It did make me feel nostalgic for Deus Ex because that's what it looks like. The notion of a FPS that takes you through time to fight on a variety of historic battlefields is a great one and it's pretty much standard FPS action, make your way towards a series of checkpoints and kill everyone in your way, repeat. Adding a few friendly and enemy soldiers who cannot die due to the affect on history it would have was a unique twist though. A good idea, to bad it looks it's 10 years old.

The game isn't horrible, but simply a huge let down. If you browse gaming websites or magazines you've no doubt been hearing about this for a few months. It seemed like an awesome idea; you travel through time fighting some of the 'darkest' battles in history, using not only historic weaponry but futuristic tech as well. Basically, there are a few major issues that I took with the game. First, the graphics look quite dated, despite utilizing new Nvidia PhysX technology. But after seeing the sheer number of 3d characters on screen (as high as 300 according to claims, but I would guess I saw around 50-150) you can understand the use of 'dated' graphics. And, honestly that wouldn't be an issue, I love the idea of having that many characters on screen because in theory it would add to the feeling that you are these battles. But, in my experience I never felt like I was in one of these bloody historic battles. Which brings me to my second point...the AI. The game seemed to really skimp in this department. Just running and gunning you may not notice it, but there are times when you can 'sneak' up behind an enemy line...but what happened when I did that was I saw many poorly rendered soldiers just standing there. They weren't shooting the opposing force (which was right in front of them) and they weren't shooting me! In fact they weren't doing anything and if I would shoot one (seemingly helping my side) another soldier would come out of nowhere and instantly fall into place, exactly where the last soldier was. This fact made the game feel like my efforts weren't worth anything and useless. I think the horrible AI could have been overlooked, along with the graphics if soldiers didn't instantly replace the soldiers you killed. Another example of the same issue is when I was sniping soldiers on a ridge. Each soldier I shot was replaced in less than 1 second, by another soldier, and in the exact spot. So, I could leave my crosshair in the place and keep shooting soldiers as bodies piled up. It seems like when you kill a soldier the replacement should take a little longer to come in, or should not fall into the exact same place. Another issue I had was the huge 'open-world' complete with historic maps. That feature seemed worthless most of the time as the game places fences, etc in your way so that you have to stay on a certain path.

All in all, the game is decently fun but don't expect much. The idea is cool but there are much better FPS' out there.