Darkest of Days

This is a North America only game and also a pretty clever game title that works on so many levels. When I initially got Darkest of Days, I thought it would be based during either World War I or World War II and be a traditional war shooter. The only reason I got it was to make use of the American Xbox I own as it’s not a genre I would usually play.

Now, the reason that I think the title is clever. As soon as I started playing the game, I realised that the gameplay, game design and construction is so bad that it’s a circular reference to gaming in general and that playing the game is most likely the darkest day you will experience in the medium. Bad joke aside, here’s why.

You play as a guy called Morris who is fighting during Custer’s Last Stand. You may be led into thinking that this is therefore a game set during the American Civil War. You will immediately hope not though as soon as you are asked to wield a shitty pistol at some Indians. The aiming mechanics are bad, and the graphics and gameplay generally don’t lead a lot to you being in for a good ride.

Anyway, Morris gets injured and is about to be killed when outta nowhere, a portal appears and some dude drags you into the future. I know what you’re thinking – what a twist! It gets better too as your mission becomes travelling back through time to World War I, World War II and The American Civil War to rescue some people of significance to the future timeline while you try and find the father of time dude who invented the concept of time travel.

The premise is fairly good, original and inventive however it’s completely derailed by the shocking graphics and gameplay that would have been more at home on the original Playstation. It got worse the more I played as they tried to create that war time effect of having loads of guys fighting each other at the same but all this did was murder the frame rates and make the game unplayable at points.

The difficulty is another thing that puzzled me. There are three difficulties to play on and I spent most of my time playing on easy but this doesn’t seem to mean anything at all difficulties seem to have the same ridiculous difficulty spikes. My favourite thing in all games is not knowing how or why I died and the enemies range from not being able to hit a barndoor with a banjo to being able to snipe you from 750 metres with a World War II rifle. Get fucked.

Musically, its grating and the characters swear more than necessary and I couldn’t listen to a lot of the contrived dialogue.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

Another limited list and despite the frustrations, its probably possible to get through it in around 8 hours. It felt a lot longer for me due to the constant death and shitty frame rates causing me to vomit in my mouth repeatedly.

Anyway, from playing the game without worrying about anything else, 4 achievements will be earned. Technically 5 for playing the ridiculously shit hidden mission at the end of the game where the game developers thank you for playing and tell you how much effort they put in to making this pile of smokeweed.

There are five miscellaneous achievements available and these are best done on easy at the beginning on the game. The first one alludes to the game having a sense of humour. It’s called Horse Puncher and it’s awarded for punching a horse to death. This is easily done in the first mission when Indian arrows from point blank range do nearly no damage to you. You can run into a crowd of horses wailing on the melee button and this will unlock easily.

The next two are for killing yourself, either with a grenade or via drowning, both of which are easy to do in the first World War I mission.

The next two are strange as it’s a gun-based game but you get awarded for completing a level without killing anyone and also for punching 25 dudes to death. The second one is made even more bizarre as generally speaking, you have to run through their bullets to apply the killing blow – another cause of constant death.

After each mission you will be awarded upgrade points to apply to either your skill with pistols or rifles. There is a limited about of points available and there are two achievements for upgrading both the pistol and rifle to the maximum level. The easiest way to net both is to save all the upgrade points until you have the 40 required to upgrade a weapon fully, upgrade one, then reload a previous save and upgrade the other.

The last achievement is for completing the game on the hardest difficulty level but thankfully there is a Bioshock-style work around where you can play the game on easy right up until the end and then change the difficulty to the highest one and then finish the game. This is the only blessing in an otherwise dyer experience.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Darkest of Days will definitely be remembered as a dark point in my gaming history. The basic gameplay mixed with grey/brown environments was bad enough but throw in the terrible gameplay functionality and it really is just a pile of smoking garbage. I wouldn’t even say it was easy due to the variable AI ability an it’s certainly not worth anyone’s time investment.