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03/01 - Halo 3: ODST (Master Chief Collection)
06/01 - Halo 3 (Master Chief Collection)
09/01 - Hotshot Racing
25/01 - Halo 4 (Master Chief Collection)
29/01 - Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
03/02 - Heavenly Sword
05/02 - Need for Speed: Carbon (Battle Royale)
09/02 - Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
20/02 - ICO
24/02 - Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker HD
25/02 - Halo 5: Guardians
05/03 - Asura's Wrath
09/03 - Shadow of the Colossus HD (Normal mode)
30/03 - Shadow of the Colossus HD (Hard mode)
30/03 - Forza Motorsport 3 (100%)
01/04 - Muramasa: The Demon Blade
11/04 - Forza Horizon 2 (100%)
17/04 - The Darkness
20/04 -
The Darkness II
Figured I might a well do this one again too since I did the first one. I've never liked this one as much as the first, but still been generally positive on it. It lost a lot of the atmosphere of the first game, but it tried to do a lot to improve and expand the mechanics. Coming back to it, I'm not so sure it was as successful on that second front after all.
Aesthetically and tonally it is massively different. It's much brighter and more colourful, going with a cel shaded look that is pretty attractive on its own merits. But it shifts the feel of the game a lot to something much more cartoonish. Characters were never especially deep in the first game, but here they feel like shallow stereotypes in comparison to even that. There are elements that you could say are even more edgy than in the first game, but they are treated in a way that feels crass and not taken particularly seriously, so they don't come across as being as affecting. There's also the introduction of a lot more supernatural elements to the world outside of the Darkness itself, and it hurts the mystery and imposing nature that came from it being the only thing like that you come across. The new villains are not compelling either, being pretty generic evil cultist types. This game also actually shows much more interacting between Jenny and Jackie than the first game too, but none of it has the same impact that only the short few scenes the first game had, because of the overall tone of this game, how ineffectively they are placed within the pacing of the campaign, and how it's pretty clear they are all illusions anyway. I will give it credit for one thing though. They replace the Otherworld sections with sections that take place in a mental hospital, as the story tries to get you to question what is actually real at all. While I miss the loss of the old Otherworld sections, this is at least a decent idea on its own. But it falls foul of a lot of the same problems as the rest of the game with its shallow tone.
Gameplay wise, a lot of what it does seems good on paper, but in practice it often stumbles over itself. This time it's a straightforward linear campaign with no overworld to walk around. While there are non-combat sections, you don't really get anywhere to explore and there's only ever one string of objectives to go through. Not a bad thing in principle, but still a little disappointing.
You have a lot more control over your demonic tentacles this time, and that does come with a lot of cool ideas. You can slash in whatever direction you want, meaning you can use that to be a close range sweep, or throw enemies up in the air to immobilise them, etc. You can also grab enemies with the other tentacle and do a range of executions to them which each give you a different reward. Or you can grab stuff like ammo, or objects to throw at enemies. Much more than just what was essentially a basic melee attack in the first game. But issues start arising when it comes to what specifically you try to use your tentacles for. There are so many context sensitive actions, and only a couple of buttons for them all. It results in a lot of struggling to get them to do what you want them. You might be trying to pick up an object, but they just want to pick up a random gun instead, or vice versa. It can be a massive problem in the middle of a hectic gunfight when you really need the controls to do what you expect them to, and they just don't.
Another issue arises from the change of art style. With the lighter and more vibrant colour palette, it becomes really hard to tell what exactly counts as a lit or dark area, so you can't confidently get around in a fight, or will sometimes be hit with an unexpected light area that kills all your powers and blinds you with post-process effects.
The game also heavily relies on ADS mechanics, and this game reminded me of why I generally don't like them. I was starting to soften on them recently after playing Halo Infinite and replaying 5, but here they started getting on my nerves again. That said, generally the shooting is a lot tighter than the first game, and movement is somewhat faster too. But this game does the thing where going in to ADS mode sticks the gun right in the middle of screen so much that you can't see what you're shooting at. It's basically required to hit anything that isn't right in front of you, but doing so feels like it blinds you by obstructing your view anyway.
I think one thing that made this stuff stand out to me this time is the difficulty I tried to go for on this run. I played most of this on the third out of the four modes. I assumed since I've played this twice before I shouldn't have much trouble. Turns out it made things pretty frustrating. Enemies have way too much health on that mode, and you're really fragile too. Dropping it down one level made things go much more smoothly, but also perhaps was a little too easy.
Oh, and another small thing I was thinking about mentioning with the first game but didn't. But it turned out to be relevant here too. Both these games use a certain word in dialogue a couple of times which in the years since has become considered a slur. It was kind of jarring hearing it early on in the first game, a reminder of a different time. But in that game, it only happens a couple of times near the start, and it comes from characters who you could believe would say it, and who are also meant to be pretty unpleasant people. In this second game it gets dropped in to dialogue a couple of times randomly through the game, from characters who are supposed to be seen positively. It's a significantly younger game, but I guess it's still pretty old in the context of this issue.
So I have to say I was a little disappointed going back to this one. I don't think it's terrible or anything, but the qualities that I felt like it at least had in its favour before turned out to be less impressive than I remembered. Maybe it has something to do with playing it immediately after the first game, which I don't recall having done before. Pitting them so closely side by side, what is lacking feels much starker. Shooters in general have had a bit of a renaissance since this game too. This came out right after the first big wave of CoD taking over the genre, and so took a lot of influence from that, even if it had its own thing going on with the demonic powers too. But now we've had the modern Doom games school the entire genre in just how tight, complex, and fast it's possible to make a shooter all at once, reviving older design that was supposed to not be possible on a controller. Halo Infinite to a degree as well showing how it's possible to hybridise a lot of shooter design from various eras and make it work, while still adding in fresh ideas that give it its own identity. The grapple hook from that game is sort of similar to the tentacle grab from this game too I suppose.