Xbox 360: Darkest of Days Review

In Darkest of Days, you play a solider who embarks on a mission to go back in time to combat a futuristic threat, and prevent them from altering historic events. Main plat sound interesting to you? That's the only high point of the game.

While I do appreciate the whole time travel angle in games like this, It means nothing if the overall experience is mediocre when compared to other games in the genre. And Darkest of Days' play mechanics are indeed mediocre.

The game features what I like to call "phantom hints." these somewhat helpful boundaries are scattered around the entire game, and they server to either tell you to go somewhere else, or to annoy the crap out of you. Most people call these things invisible walls. Either way, they're abundant in Darkest of Days.

If you ever manage to get anywhere is this game, you'll find the artificial intelligence to be ironically missing in your enemies and teammates. They mostly just stand around, or run at you like those nameless henchmen in every action movie ever made.

this kamikaze strategy gets old real quick. On top of that, some enemy solders strange blue glow around them. They're not stick lines, or spidey-sense. Those are the soldiers who are supposed to survive the battle, so killing them would be very bad for your bottom line.

So because of the mindless drones that litter the battle field, they usually end up getting in the way. I found myself intentionally go after these highlighted fighters, mostly out of shear boredom. Okay...Mostly because I'm slightly demented, and the boredom triggered by Darkest of Days' game play only served to encourage that.

Suppose I could also pin the blame on slowdown in the middle on Darkest of Days uninspired game play. Things get very sluggish and choppy at certain points. I guess it stresses the 360 to render a large horde of ADHD patients, dressed as trained solders fighting in World War I(which preceded that other World War that had 8 million or so games dedicated to it already) on screen at once. It was stressing to me knowing that this game could have turned out a lot better than it did.

Graphics are decent, but not groundbreaking. Sound is just as disappointing as game play. Big weapons like the turret don't have that booming noise when shot that you would expect. Everything sounds muffled, so you never really become emerst in the atmosphere. If by some chance the developers plan on making Darkest of Days 2, One can only hope they use this as a template and finish what they initially started. The concept is great, but everything else just seems like a rush job.