Darkest of Days Preview

Posted by Tim On September - 9 - 2009

I had the great pleasure of playing a near-final build of indy developer 8monkey Labs’ newest game, Darkest of Days. This game is one of many adopting nVidia’s PhysX technology which really seems to be taking off in regards to dev support. Take the role of Custer’s last stand’s only survivor, Alexander Morris….

Wait, what?

A game that takes historical shooters in a different direction, the effort is not necessarily indicative of the overall game fun-level. The promise is there, though.

The game released on this week, and to give you an idea of what the game is about, read on….

So I am a casual fan of history, knowing that at any given moment most of what we’re taught in school is horribly biased. Knowing what I know now about people and the human condition, I have a slightly more probable idea of how some things went down. There was no good or evil, and everything is morally gray. From a premise standpoint, this is where the idea of Darkest of Days caught me and I was excited to play a game that was trying to tell it like it may have been. Bloody, dark, and with a bit of a sci-fi twist. Its more likely something like this will happen than George Washington never telling a lie.

As I said earlier, you are Alexander Morris, sole survivor of Custer’s last stand. Fortunately, while injured you are rescued by a man in fancy clothes and none too smooth a demeanor.

You step through the portal well into the future, where you’re met by a rough speaking (seriously rough – you don’t want your kids around when you play this if they’re still “innocent.”) companion who you find out is going to be your partner. From here you go through what has now been known as the standard for meshing training and story, which is a short tutorial that assumes you’ve played a FPS before, but not this one. There are the FPS staples: machine guns, grenades, snipes, etc. But there is another mechanic that is introduced but not really explained well. Essentially there are important people in history that shouldn’t die, so you have to just take them out with these special orbs that knock them unconscious. Once you run out of them, though – you have to try and take them down, but not out, with a shot in the knee or shoulder. This is tougher than it sounds, considering most battles you are using a flintlock rifle or German Luger. The PhysX work really is apparent here, as those weapons are inaccurate as all hell, and the farther you shoot, the more actual arc you have to put in your shot. This is over long distances, and later in the game there are some weapons that really show off the cool physics work.

The game looks good. There are some tough frame rate spots that pop up because of the sheer number of people on the battlefield. I honestly was shocked at the sheer numbers I was fighting from time to time. Sadly, most of my compatriots were falling like flies around me but somehow the enemy’s ranks always thinned out eventually. From time to time I got to throw down on the big guns, like the cannons Having actually fired a 12 pound howitzer myself on multiple occasions, it was semi accurate in regards to the feel and look. One issue I took is that one man cannot reload, move, and fire a cannon that fast. But it is a game.

The game places you behind time-accurate weaponry, uniforms, and uses historically accurate troop deployment and movement in the battles, most of the time giving you a good idea how ugly battle truly is. Run, then gun, then hide behind a rock. Your health meter is unfixed, showing up as a darkening of the screen and blood splattering on it a’la Gears of War. It works well because you get shot A LOT. I think the system will do well to help you not feel like you’re continually dying, which always gets frustrating.

Now to jump to a really cool part which I was VERY happy to see, which is the ‘corrections’ that you get to perform on history when battles are changed and history goes awry. You get to apply some heavy force to save certain people from dying. You get weapons from super fast machine guns to auto shotguns to awesome laser guided mortar launchers that lay waste to anything and everything that moves.

Now, for the preview I had to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. Will I pick it up? Probably not.

Sadly, the narrative is told mostly through other people. The protagonist, Alexander Morris, has almost nothing to say and is really just a pawn in what looks to be a big corporate scheme involving time travel paradoxes that make the Terminator series seem completely cogent. The fun I had running around in time-accurate battles waged heavily, but I was just too frustrated at times with problems with the maps, the environment, and being beaten to death by my own allies. There are things you can fix in a month, and then there are things you can’t. If they hit 100% of all the issues I had, I still don’t know if I would truly have fun for more than a few hours. The levels are looong and while its cool to a point to battle it out Frankenau, battles are not nearly as exciting when they are too accurate.

I definitely recommend you rent it through Gamefly or Blockbuster and give it a few days to really soak in the history, as you will definitely find yourself being more curious about history after playing this game.

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