19 hours playtime
50 of 50 achievements
I completed The Darkness II yesterday. I thoroughly enjoyed it – enough to play through twice (because, well, one of the achievements is finishing a new game+). I liked the graphics style. The weapons and skills make for a really fun mindless shooter berzerking experience. And the Vendetta characters (more achievements!) offer nice playstyle variations.
The story is ok, I guess; it could have been so much more, but it just wasn’t. At least it didn’t disturb the “mindlessly shooting” part. And at some points the story or some side stuff was really funny. (Well at other points it tried but wasn’t, at least not for me. But it didn’t fail too badly.)
Finally … negative stuff. Actually these are really big things, writing this I’m surprised that I still enjoyed the game as much.
- First thing that really bothered me was the low quality German audio. Compression artifacts and all that. It’s probably not even that bad, but … well, once you notice, you just can’t unhear stuff like that. This is not the first game with this problem – but the usual fix would be to just switch to English. Yeeeeah … can’t do that. I guess my key is region locked.
- What was actually a lot worse was the horribly broken blurry vision thing. See, there are moments in this game when the screen goes all blurry. At first I thought it would happen when I get hit and/or look into some light – that’s probably what it’s supposed to be, but nope, most of the time it’s unrelated. It’s not really depth of field either (blurred backdrop for the crispy stuff you look at). Whatever it is, it just happens, stays for a few moments, and then goes away completely unmotivated. It wouldn’t even be too bad, but …
- You hide from the light in this game. Lights are blinding and weaken you, so you do your best to get rid of all the lamps. This works great in the single player story. In the Vendetta missions … yeah not so much. The scene lighting is generally not as good, and there are so much more lights you just can’t destroy – you are forced to handle whole fights in the light, which is something you just don’t do in the single player. Ever. But the worst thing about this: Remember that broken blurry vision thing? … Yeah there are moments when you can’t see anything. At all. For 30 seconds. Because blinded+blur=whiteout.
I realize I spent more time complaining than praising (again), so I feel I have to repeat: I enjoyed this game, I don’t think it’s bad at all. And I made heaps of screenshots for 5 or 6 different things for the monthly theme, at some point I’ll have to decide which 4 I’ll use :)
Congrats on the completion! It looks like an interesting game even with your criticism you say you’ve enjoyed it enough to play it twice, so that’s a good sign :) What’s next?
Haven’t really decided what to play next; I have a rather good run on the SG wins these last weeks, so I’ll probably pick another one of those. But life’s a little exciting and I don’t know if I’ll have time/patience for anything big (life is exciting, umm … yay I guess). I took to some casual hogging for now … I should probably pick up Doom again before it gets “cold”, but I just haven’t been in the mood lately.
Oh, I forgot checking out the whole Vendetta thing. That’s what I get when I finish a game once and decide to call it quits, I should pay more attention.
I noticed the blur effect a few times, but usually forgot about it since it seemed to go away by itself after a while. But it was a bit odd, because as you said it doesn’t seem to be tied to a certain trigger.
Congrats on completing the game!
It’s okay to be negative in reviews if it highlights the problems. Complaints and criticisms are good things to learn from.
“You hide from the light in this game.” Reverse Alan Wake?
Huh, funny way to look at it :) I never noticed, but it does sound a little like reverse Alan Wake … there are even enemies chasing you with flash lights :) Well at least you don’t burst into flames when you enter the light. You “just” don’t heal and lose out on all the cool stronger-in-the-darkness stuff you spent points on.
I kinda do the complaining more than praising thing a lot. For stuff I like it’ll just be “it’s really nice” and if I don’t like it I’ll have one paragraph about its flaws. -shrugs-