The Darkness Review (Spoiler Free)

I rented The Darkness and finished the single player last night.  I didn't play the MP at all, so my review is based exclusively on the single player campaign.

I came into this game with certain expectations based on reviews I read when it was released.  The overwhelming theme of these reviews was "great story, but spotty gameplay."  Well, I am generally on board with this assessment, but I didn't like the story and thought that the gameplay was very unbalanced and should be described as somewhere between bad to awful.  The first chapter is incredibly hard because you are stuck fighting hoardes of bad guys with weapons that are the functional equivalent of a pea shooter.  As an example, at one point, I was fighting four baddies at distance, ran out of ammo for my pistols, and was thus forced to fight a ranged battle with a SHOTGUN, my only other weapon at that point.  To make matters worse, the save points early in the game are very spread out.  I got so frustrated that I almost quit before I got to the end of the first chapter.  I am far from a gaming pro, so my difficulty may have been a lack of skill, but it was a terrible experience regardless of the reason for it.  However, there is a very interesting sequence that plays out at the end of the first chapter that spurred me to keep playing to see where the story was going to go.  The difficulty issues started to balance out in the second chapter as I acquired some more useful weapons.  I feel that the difficulty of this chapter should have been the general range of difficulty throughout.  By the third chapter, the balancing issues got turned on their heads and I felt that the game became too easy.  On top of that, the story started to slow and become less and less interesting because it became increasingly obvious that there were certain fundamental questions that were not going to be answered.  Don't get me wrong, there were lots of little things in the story that I was seriously curious about, but the path of the story kept going away from these truly interesting bits and focused instead on the typical Hollywood type stuff.  I seriously considered quitting at this point, but I felt like I had invested too much time in the game already not to see it through and I knew that I would wonder how things got wrapped up, especially whether I was wrong about the direction that the story was headed, and that this curiousity may make me rent this game again (and I did not want to do that), so I went ahead and played it out.  One thing that really sucks, especially in the later chapters, is that you spend a ridiculous amount of time walking from one place to the next or watching the cutscenes that were designed to mask the load screens (this was a really cool idea, but you are required to go through these cutscenes so often that they start to repeat, especially the subway ones).  Anyway, to keep this spoiler free, the final boss battle was a major let down and the conclusion of the story was terrible.  IMO, it wrapped up a grand total of ZERO questions that I had (at least none that I found remotely interesting). 

In conclusion, I like a couple of the ideas that The Darkness attempts to utilize (the cut scenes to mask the load screens, a couple of the chapter concepts - though not their execution - that I don't want to mention specifically since I am trying to keep this spoiler free), but these good ideas were not sufficient to overcome the unbalanced gameplay, the endless walking, the amazing number of load screens that have to be endured, and the lack of resolution of any of the interesting story concepts.  I am tremendously happy that I didn't buy this game when it was released (and I had seriously considered it), but in the end this game wasn't even worthy of the rental.