In Darkest of Days, PC gamers get to experience some of the most varied single player first-person shooter gameplay ever released in one title. Things will never get stale as you travel to distant times and fight alongside people from that time period. For example, fighting in Antietam (the bloodiest day of the American Civil War) feels much different than fighting on the side of the Russians at Tannenberg (where the Russians withstood 140,000 casualties in WWI.) 
Fight key battles from both sides.
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Mission play in 5 time periods.
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Mix and match weapons across time.
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In many ways, the history of humanity is the history of our conflicts against one another over the millienia. In Darkest of Days players physically explore this history and endevor to maintain it as it was meant to unfold. As the game opens the player is snatched from grim date with death by a shadow organization. As unlikely as this would seem, this is only the beginning as you are placed in the even more unlikely position of guardian of key conflicts in human history. Shuttled back and forth in time, it is your task to ensure that specific events on both sides of these conflicts occur as they were meant to happen and that mistakes made along the way are fixed. Gameplay
Action in Darkest of Days is mission directed. As the player is transported back and forth in time, directives are spelled out that can include anything from victory of one side over the other, to the survival of an individual important to history in an otherwise doomed company and even assasinations. These actions take place in a variety of conflicts within time periods including the Roman era, the American Civil and Indian Wars, WWI and WWII. Mission types include stealth, artillery assaults, and sniper attacks and players can expect in most situations to be called upon to impact events from both sides of the front lines. To make these impacts players will have over 20 weapons on hand, most conflict-specific, but also some futuristic. They will also be able to choose their own means of completing missions according to the resources at hand across wide open battlefields designed to support over 300 combatants, each with their own AI capacities. Key Game Features - Fight in Five Different Time Periods - Whether you are on the slopes of vesuvias in Pompeii, on the battlelines and trenches of Antietam and the clashes of WWI, or the American Indian Wars of the late 19th century, you will fight with real weapons from the time period. You will battle against enemies that fight in different ways, all reflective of how fighting was done at the time.
- Play From Opposing Sides of the Conflict - War is never a one-sided affair, and so the developers of Darkest of Days have ensured that players Nearly every time period offers gameplay from each side of the conflict. In trying to keep history pure, you have to undo mistakes that you make, which may require fighting from the other perspective to "mend" time.
- Unleash Hell with Futuristic Weaponry - What could you have done with an automatic rifle during the civil war, or some futuristic laser sighted pulse canon in the trenches of WWI? There are times where you have no other choice but to bust out the big guns.
- Participate in Epic Battle Scenes
- You will fight against the Confederates (and the Union at times), facing a stagering number of troops, all fighting in unison. Ready, aim...steady men...FIRE!
- You will jump from the trenches of WWI to lead an attack against the Hun. You will fire artillery to hit distint targets. You will defend to the last man.
- You will fight in Pompeii, while Mt. Vesuvius is spewing ash and fire into the atmosphere. You will fight amongst a frightened population, fleeing for their lives.
- Marmoset Game Engine - Game developer 8Monkey Labs' Marmoset game engine was designed specifically for this game and allows up to 300 characters on screen at a time facilitating huge, smooth flowing battles.
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 Excellent, but short. |
| Review Date: January 23, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Joshua, |
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
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| Review Date: November 27, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Gary A. Brinkerhoff, Pinellas Park,FL. USA |
| 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. |
Awesome!!
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| Review Date: September 9, 2009 |
| Reviewer: The Shape, |
I've been having a blast with this game. 300 soldiers on screen at once with dead-on historical accuracy for each time period? Yes, yes and more yes!!
Highly recommended to anyone looking for a unique FPS, and particularly anyone interested in seeing Nvidia PhysX technology hard at work. |
A lot of potential, doesn't quite reach it
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| Review Date: September 11, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Lisa Shea, |
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. |
A bit rough, but not bad
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| Review Date: October 1, 2009 |
| Reviewer: R. Parker, |
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 |
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