3 months ago
Darkest of Days is a new IP from newcomer video game developer 8monkeylabs. In the game you take the role of a solder from U.S. Army General Custard's army and are thrown right into the action of Custard's defeat at Little Bighorn. Luckily for you, a corperation in the distant future had discovered time travel and rescues you from certain death. Why you? It's because you're MIA (missing in action) and nobody is going to miss you. It seems that somebody's been going about in time messing things up causing mess-ups in the space/time continuum. It's apparently up to you to make things right by traveling to different battles and saving those who need to live and making sure the others meet their historical demise.
Storyline-wise, the folks at 8monkeylabs have given us a little nugget as the concept is intreguing. You get to take part in a number of different key battles in a small assortment of large-scale histoical wars (both World Wars, the U.S. Civil War, and even Pompeii in the year 79 A.D.). Having the ability for time travel from future years, you have the ability to take with you far superiour firepower. Want to turn an ancient phalanx into swiss cheese? Go right ahead. There are a few head-scratchers, however, such as how travel back into time is possible but not forward (which leaves you wondering how you get back to your point of origin) and how a 19th-century infantryman can become proficient in all sorts of weaponry after only a very basic ten-minute tutorial.
Most of the visuals, at first glance, were well done by the developers. It is obvious that pains were taken to make sure 19th-century Antietum looked more-or-less correct. The same is true for the Eastern front of World War I as well as the other locals. 8monkeylabs seems to take a step backwards in actual graphical quality, though, as the presentation harkens back to the day of 2-D trees and paper-thin bushes. Also, the character graphics are lacking a bit too. It's truely a wonder why the game's minimum system requirements are as high as they are (2.0 GHz CPU, ATI Radion 9800 or nVidia GeForce 6600, 1GB RAM). The game, by the way, won't run on a brand-new Toshiba Satillite laptop with a 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo and 3GB of RAM simply because it had a integtated 1024MB Intel video. It did run just fine on a self-built desktop PC with a 512GB nVidia GeForce video card, though. Just a word of warning.
Another point where the game comes up wanting is in the audio department. Many of the sound effects are canned, meaning that they're your normal assortment of FPS-themed sounds. The dialogue, save for the very beginning, also isn't all that great. Overall, it doesn't take too much away from the game but it definatly doesn't add to the experience.
The controls are about what one would expect for a FPS. the WSRD movement controls are all but standard for PC games and the mouse does well enough for looking around. Weapon select is with the mouse-wheel and firing your gun is done with a mouse click. The only issue had was due to familiarity with other PC FPS games where the <SHIFT> button is used to zoom in and use the sight. No such luck there, though the controls can be modified to meet your needs as a gamer.
Rather than using an already established gaming engine such as Unreal for Darkest of Days, 8monkeylabs developed and implimented their own. It really doesn't look too shabby as it seems capable of large-scale battles. It isn't perfect, though, as there seem to be invisible obsticles that prevent you from getting the occasional drop on enemies or taking a short-cut through the very large maps. It is however unclear if it was a limitation of the engine or simply in-game scripting.
Content is one other place where a prospectivly great game went bad. There is only a single-player option (so no multiplayer). It's a shame because even a limited multiplayer option would vastly improve replay value. Besides, opening the game up for a capture-the-flag or a kill-count mode based in one of the historicle settings would be something that would set Darkest of Days apart from other PC FPS games. Maybe that's something that 8monkeylabs is thinking about for the sequel (assuming there is one in the works) or for a future patch or expansion.
As it stands right now, Darkest of Days is only so-so. It's not bad, it's not great, it just is. If that's fine by you (or you find the game on sale somewhere) it's worth picking up. Just check your system requirements first.
Final Game Guys Grade: C+
- Game Guy Barry White bcwhite@news10.net
News10/KXTV
