Not to be confused with Darksiders, Dark Souls, or any other games with dark in the title, The Darkness 2 is very much is own beast. The Darkness 2 demo opens up by warning you that the events within will not necessarily occur in this order, which is a bit of a shame seeing as events are pieced together in an interesting manner that creates a great balance between scripted story sections and gameplay.  

 

After the main character Jackie Estacado gives you a brief rundown of who he is, and hints at events that occurred in the first game, it soon becomes apparent that he’s gotten himself into a bit of a pickle at present. Jackie opens his eyes to find that he’s been captured and is having his hands nailed to a wooden beam as if he were the anti-Christ. The game sets out its violent and sadistic stall early by having blood splatter onto the screen as a rusty nail is hammered through your palm, and features a creepy moment where one of your tormentors runs a finger across Jackie’s blood-soaked face and says “I like the way he feels...he feels sticky”. As it turns out, these creepy guys are holding our anti-hero hostage for the sole purpose of stealing Jackie’s darkness powers from him by hook or by crook.

 

Just as a mean looking trench coat wearing assailant gets all up in your first person grill, the screen fades to white and rewinds time to a more comfortable period for Jackie. Having been made a mob boss thanks to his efforts in The Darkness 1, Jackie is now the proud owner of a lavish Italian restaurant. As your buddy Vinny walks you through the dining area, you get a good look at the significant visual changes made to this dark tale. While the original was grounded in a more realistic art style, The Darkness 2 draws more from the series’ comic book roots to present the game with a look not too dissimilar to that of fellow First Person Shooter; (FPS) Borderlands. In practice this means a generally richer colour pallet and black outlines around character and objects to make them, and the game itself, stand out from the crowd.

 

After moving through the restaurant, and making use of the right stick to move the camera around, Jackie sits down at his usual table to mingle with a couple of blonde twins he met at the Candy Club. Unfortunately, before Jackie can even order a starter the shit well and truly hits the fan when one twin is shot through the head from the window behind her and a van then crashes through the window, slamming into the twins and sending you flying across the room in slow motion. At this crucial juncture, the screen then fades to black and The Darkness 2 logo flashes up on the screen to rubber-stamp the attention grabbing opener to the demo.

 

Jackie opens his eyes once more to find himself lying on the floor with a dead twin and your own mangled leg for company. Vinnie then appears over you and takes charge of things by deciding to escape by dragging your injured self to the back exit of the restaurant. Jackie’s then handed a pistol by Vinnie to cover your ass as you beat a hasty retreat. This sequence acts as your introduction to the shooting mechanics, whereby R1/RB shoots a bullet and Square/x reloads, standard fair really. As you’re dragged backwards, the restaurant is burning and being torn apart all around you as gun fire rages all around and bullets fly everywhere as an enemy gang pours into the building, without as much as a table reservation.

 

Due to the incredulity of not bothering to wipe their feet on the way in, Jackie guns the advancing goons down with a couple of shots a piece before they drop down dead. Additionally, the l1/lb button can be used to zoom in and look down the sites of a gun, as well as snapping to a nearby target for increased accuracy. The mobsters sometimes take cover behind upturned tables and chairs, but it’s not too troubling during this early portion of the game. As Vinnie drags you further through the restaurant, your own gang members appear to try and help with the tactical retreat but just end up getting cut apart pretty quickly, with one having the misfortune to die from a falling chandelier. Despite this, Jackie and Vinnie soldier on and almost end up getting run over by yet another careless van driver who comes ploughing through a brick wall in front of you.

 

Shortly after this, Vinnie sets you down behind a bar so he can catch his breath. Somewhat inevitably, your momentary peace is shattered by raging machine gun fire which pins you to the floor. Jackie promptly picks up his gun to return fire from a weird 45 degree angle as he lies on the floor. After popping some caps in a few assess, Vinnie decides upon making a break for the fire exit in the kitchen and, instead of dragging you across the floor like an animal carcass, he lifts you up and hands you his own gun so as to afford Jackie a nice taste of dual wielding weapons.

 

So off you go once again, with more unfriendly mobsters on your tail. L1 is now used to fire the gun in your left hand, so unfortunately there’s no aiming down the site when in possession of two guns. Once a few more tactically inept enemies bite the dust, the doors to the kitchen swing shut as Vinnie sets you down to try and open the fire exit. Unfortunately his attempts are futile and before long a Molotov cocktail comes flying through a window and explodes in a raging fire in front of you, eventually fading the screen to white.

 

After a short cutscene with Jackie back on his unholy cross and the player being drip-fed more story titbits, Jackie wakes up on the kitchen floor coughing up blood as the demonic voice of The Darkness screeches at Jackie to submit and make use of its powers. At this point, through a hole blown through the kitchen wall, you can see your chief trench coat wearing tormentor from before walk away as a gun-toting goon of his comes to finish you off. Jackie gingerly crawls forward as the man in an orange jumpsuit beckons you forward to receive a clean death from a bullet in the barrel of his gun. With no alternative option available, Jackie then chooses to unleash the Darkness he has subdued within himself. He flings a dark tentacle from his hand to skewer the baddie in front of you, and subsequently sprouts the two tentacle heads synonymous with The Darkness series from his shoulders. Now hovering in a back alley outside, Jackie dispatches three more goons by cleaving two in two and flinging the last against a brick wall.

 

Your mangled leg from the van ambush is then magically healed before you’re plonked onto the ground and given control proper, as opposed to the on-rails parts beforehand.  As well as getting the twin tentacles you also find out that Vinnie managed to escape the fire too and his slumped down on the ground with his back to a garbage bin. Vinnie explains he doesn’t know who attacked them, but he did see the mysterious trench coat guy with a limp escape down the alley and also muses that you should probably rendezvous with your surviving gang members. Now with an objective to complete, at this point you can press the select button to bring up a marker on the screen that tells you how far away you are from your current objective, just like Call of Duty or any number of other FPS’s do.

 

Moving further down the grimy back alley you come to a halt at a wooden fence that also features a mobster shooting at you from a balcony above it. At this juncture you’re coached through the primary use for the left tentacle, which is grabbing and throwing objects. To grab something you point the crosshair at it and press l2/left trigger, the item, which in this case was a metal pole, is snatched up and can be thrown by aiming the item were you want it to go and hitting l2/left trigger again. If you’re doing it right, at this stage you should see the metal pole be flung at the enemy like a javelin and impale him to a nearby wall. After this neat little distraction, to get past the wooden fence you need to utilise the right tentacle, as it’s used for powerful melee slashes that eviscerate enemies and smash apart breakable objects. Furthermore, you can also direct the tentacle slashes in a more precise direction, should the situation call for it, by moving the right analogue stick up, down, left or right as you press r2/right trigger. 

 

In the next dingy alley, Jackie is haunted by a fleeting image of his dead girlfriend as a spooky aside to the brilliantly bloody combat. Next, as you move into the back room of a barber shop you find a Mafioso talking on the phone with his back to you. As you might expect, this is the perfect opportunity to catch him unawares and grab him with your left tentacle before using a stylish execution move to slaughter him in a brutal fashion. There are three execution moves Jackie starts off with in the demo, and they are the head whip (whips a guy’s head clean off), the wishbone (breaks off a person’s leg as if he were a chicken wishbone) and the anaconda (which is a gruesome finisher where one tentacle wraps tightly around the target before breaking its head straight through his chest, Alien style). As Jackie moves into the barber shop’s front room he’s taught that by stunning an enemy with a thrown object you can then lift him up for an execution move more easily.