Darkest Of Days: Hands On Preview

Have you ever wanted to play a FPS in the Civil War (YES!)? How about a game where you travel through time to right wrongs done to the time/space continuum (again, YES!)? What if I was to tell you that in about a month, you can have both in the same game (WhooHoo!)? Phanton EFX’s Darkest of Days will provide you with those opportunities & more. I just finished with my hands-on preview time with it & I must say, I enjoyed the mash up. I think Phantom EFX & 8 Monkey Labs are on the right track here with an interesting story & historically accurate period weapons.

You’ll start out as a soldier in the Battle of Little Big Horn (you know, where Custer made his now famous last stand).You become wounded & just as Custer is taken down by several arrows (he’s a tough little bugger), what looks like a giant water bubble appears in front of you. A menacing looking soldier steps out & tells you he’s there for you (he even knows your name)! After you’re patched up, you’re informed that you’re now 300 years in the future & have been recruited by KronoteK, a sort of futuristic time cop organization. These are the folks who created time travel & understand that time tampering can have catastrophic consequences, so they police things & make sure that history goes down the way it’s supposed to. After a bit of training, you will get your first mission & before it ends, you will learn that there is another player in the time travel game, one that may or may not be beneficial to the past, present or future.

With locations like the Battle of Antietam (Civil War), Frankenau (World War One) & even Pompeii (pre-volcanic eruption, of course), Darkest of Days breaks away from the traditional FPS locations (WWII or future/space/alt reality). The development team used actual topography maps from the time periods to make sure that each location is as historically accurate as possible. They also took that same attention to detail & applied it to the weapons, making sure each one is as it was back then. Of course firing a musket loaded weapon would get boring pretty quickly (it’s a big change from the running & gunning of games like Halo, Call of Duty, etc…), so they broke the accuracy a bit by allowing the player to earn experience in order to upgrade things like clip size & reload time (there’s also an active reload system in place to speed things up for you). In a few cases, they even hook you up with some killer future weaponry so you can just go all out & create some havoc. Imagine using an AK47 in the civil war! Naturally, those instances will occur only when you are in a location in which everyone will die or where your obscene fire power won’t be noticed. You don’t want any witnesses to your future tech or you may mess things up & create a butterfly effect.

Each mission will have you save certain individuals to make sure they survive long enough to get to their date with destiny.  There will also be certain people that, even though you aren’t there to save them, you absolutely cannot kill them or another time paradox may occur as they have their own role to play in the time stream. Bringing these people to harm will bring down the wrath of your employer as they send in other time cops to clean up your mess (and hunt you down). You’ll also have to figure out who the other party is, how they got the technology to travel through time & why they are tampering with it.

So if you have a hankering for some fresh FPS scenery or just want to pick up a Springfield & blow away some Confederate soldiers, then Darkest of Days may be just the title you’re looking for. No matter if you want to play on the Xbox 360 or the PC, September 8th will be your date with destiny…

I should have a review for you next month, but to get an early taste, the PC demo should be available as you’re reading this. For a list of the sites that are hosting it, check out the official web site.

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