The Darkness

In fact, the modern hero has become such a dark and twisted character that he's started seriously crossing over into the territory formerly occupied by the anti-hero - the black knight, committing evil deeds with a sneer on his lip but somehow endearing himself to the audience with his sarcastic quips and the basic, brutal justice of his quest. The anti-hero is backed into a corner. So where do we draw the line these days?

Swedish developer Starbreeze Studios loves anti-heroes. In Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, the team's absolutely stunning Xbox title, you were an (alleged) serial killer escaping from a brutal prison. In their next title, The Darkness, there's equally little confusion as to which side of the hero/anti-hero divide you're on.

Let's put it like this: heroes, even dark heroes, kill their enemies and then make blackly humorous, off-colour quips about the manner of their demise. Anti-heroes kill their enemies, and then rip their faintly pulsing hearts out of their chests, devouring the slick, blood-filled organ with gulping, animal relish. Guess which one Starbreeze has opted for in The Darkness? This isn't a game which is just dark. This is a game which is, with the Riddick pun fully intended, pitch black.

Video(game) Nasty

Two pistols, a raft of vicious darkness powers, or a Berserker darkling armed with a pneumatic drill. It's not whether he dies or not - it's how unpleasant the end is...

The Darkness is based on a graphic novel series of the same name, which despite being penned by fantastic comic scribe Garth Ennis, isn't exactly one of the finest examples of the genre. The franchise may or may not also spawn a movie this year - everything seems to have gone a bit quiet since Dimension Films grabbed the rights three years ago.

It is, in other words, something of an inauspicious background - but anyone familiar with Starbreeze knows that that shouldn't be off-putting. The Chronicles of Riddick was simultaneously one of the worst films of the year and one of the best games. Starbreeze are old hands at digging down to the core elements in a character and a universe which make it fun and appealing - and, frankly, a little bit nasty. Nasty enough to keep us hooked.

The Darkness, then, is nasty. You probably guessed that from the bit about the heart-guzzling. It's actually relentlessly nasty in places; there are moments when you revel in your own unpleasantness, and moments when you recoil a little bit, because that's just a little bit too unpleasant. The balance here is important. From our hands-on experience with the game (we've played the whole way through a preview build), it feels like Starbreeze has found just the right mix, deftly applying the intuition of a horror storyteller in balancing out excitement and discomfort.

Ah, impaled on a massive, evil tentacle of purest darkness. At least it isn't the kind of place where you worry about staining the carpets.

Like a vulture choosing only the finest morsels from a fresh corpse, the developer has expertly plucked the finest concepts from a decade of The Darkness comics, weaving them into an origin story for the character which is unlike the story of the comics, but almost certainly works better as a videogame. The bulk of the action takes place in a seedy, run-down set of New York environments which remind us of nothing more than Deus Ex's Hell's Kitchen levels. Two grotty subway stations act as hubs for the various levels, and you can pass through them and explore the game world to your heart's content. In this relatively small space, Starbreeze weaves its nasty tale of a contract killer, a mob godfather, and a particularly unpleasant evil power.

We join the anti-hero of the piece, Jackie Estacado, on his 21st birthday - working as a professional hitman for his mobster boss, Uncle Paulie, and out on a job which is going badly, badly wrong. The intro sequence betrays the developer's cinematic aspirations - you start in the backseat during an intense, entirely scripted car chase through a tunnel. Borrowing from Half-Life, the game introduces interaction only gradually; first you can look around from the backseat, then you're moved to the front (after the game's first gruesome death, we might add - under a minute in!) and given a weapon.

The next ten hours or so is a spiralling descent into the mob-run underworld of New York. Jackie is set up by the godfather of his family, the ranting, despotic Uncle Paulie, but survives because of an astonishing dark power which manifests itself in him. This power gives him the tools for a crusade of revenge that gradually escalates in body-count, blood-letting and violence.

It's around this moment that you realise that things have taken a turn for the weird - and that's AFTER you start impaling people on ten-foot tentacles.

The power in question is the eponymous Darkness, and as the screenshots reveal, it manifests itself in the form of two nasty snake-heads on either side of your screen, as well as a multitude of tentacles. The basic strategy behind this manifestation is simple: the Darkness, well, likes darkness. When you're in shadow, it absorbs power; when you're in light, it gradually weakens until such time as it disappears, and you have to find some more shadowy areas to stand in to regain your strength.

Darkness power is important, for a wide variety of reasons. Firstly, it acts as a shield that protects you from bullets - you're far from invincible with the Darkness shielding you, but at least you don't crumple like a sack of spuds at the first touch of a bullet. Secondly, it allows you to see in the dark, surrounding objects in darkness with a ghostly halo which lets you navigate even through pitch black environments.

Finally, it gives you the special powers that this game, at its purest level, is all about.

Dark Forces

At the outset, your powers are relatively limited. You can summon a Berserker minion, an unpleasant little chap who follows you around and attacks your foes (and, unfortunately, any innocent who walks into his path - he doesn't discriminate). As the game progresses, three other kinds of minion will become available to you, each with unique powers. You can also enter "Creeping Dark" mode, which allows you to control a single snake-like Darkness head, and slither along floors, walls and ceilings, chomping on the faces of enemies you meet and even interacting with objects like locked doors to clear a path for Jackie to follow.

Jackie's abilities gradually grow as you move through the game in a variety of ways. Consuming the hearts of your enemies by pressing a button while standing next to their corpse fully refills your Darkness gauge (measured cleverly by having glowing patches on the heads of your snake creatures, rather than with an ugly bar on-screen). It also increases a counter for Hearts Devoured (lovely!), which, at certain points, boosts your Darkness Level - essentially making your creatures more powerful and giving them the ability to last in lit areas for longer.

The second way to progress your abilities (not counting the obvious mechanism of picking up new weapons) is to kill and devour the hearts of "evil" people - mostly the crime bosses within Paulie's empire. These black hearts yield new powers for The Darkness - the first you pick up is a massively-strong pointed tentacle, which can be used to impale enemies, or even to lift objects like cars and fling them around. By the end of the game, you'll have acquired a number of other abilities, each of which offers new tactical opportunities in any given situation.

This is where the preview build of The Darkness we've been engrossed in for the last few days comes into its own. Each situation can be approached in a variety of different ways, thanks to the different abilities you command; exploiting the potential of the Creeping Dark mode to scout and decimate enemy forces while remaining safely hidden, for example, is a good tactic for many encounters. Others benefit from using the Dark Tentacle to create impromptu shields from garbage skips and cars, and sniping from cover, although we were disappointed to note that throwing cars at enemies doesn't actually hurt them. It merely impedes them.

Your various Darkness limbs gradually get covered in gore and splashes of blood as you cause more and more mayhem. It's the little gruesome touches that make the slaughter wonderful.

Other situations call for a more head-on, ultra-violent approach. We were happy to oblige. One level later in the game, when the feud has escalated into all-out war, sees you storming a ship in New York harbour. Marching down the corridors of the ship, twin pistols in hand, smashing every light fitting along the way with a disdainful whip of the Dark Tentacle, hearing the panic erupting around us, was a wonderful moment of gaming. It's a moment when it felt like Starbreeze really wanted us to feel what it's like to be the terror at the heart of humanity's fear of the dark.

The Darkness is filled with such moments, but Starbreeze wants you to be afraid, as well as wanting you to feel like something to be afraid of. To this end, the game also focuses around a second plotline - Jackie's struggle with The Darkness itself. His powers are more a curse than a blessing, since they are granted by a tremendously old and evil creature (voiced with wonderful panache and a hefty dose of guttural madness by former Faith No More frontman Mike Patton) who is much more interested in controlling Jackie than in being controlled by him.

This leads to a number of the game's more memorable sequences, as Jackie battles through a nightmare world reminiscent of World War 1 - but with the trenches and pillboxes filled with the walking dead. German soldiers are hollow-eyed, skeletal zombies, while the British forces (who all have chipper English accents) are stitched Frankenstein-like horrors, their body parts torn apart and put back together far too many times by a malevolent force which won't let them die. Combined with an apocalyptic red sky and a landscape which features the warped and crucified forms of the Angels of Death, it's resolutely grim and disquieting, and spices up the narrative of the game beautifully.

Afraid of the Dark?

The Gunner is the second type of Darkling you'll add to your summoning portfolio. Good one-liners, an impressively smoky cigar and a delightful chain-gun to set off the whole ensemble.

While the atmosphere of the game seems impeccable, some aspects remain somewhat rooted in the same design sensibilities we encountered in Chronicles of Riddick. The free-roaming New York environments feature a number of sub-quests, accessed simply by walking up to people and finding out what they need help with. These quests generally reward you with unlockable content (ranging from concept art to entire issues of The Darkness comic). However, they send you around districts which are generally empty of NPC characters, which miraculously repair themselves after firefights and which generally feel a bit more artificial and non-interactive than we've come to expect from next-gen entertainment.

Combined with the game's weak physics system, this can result in The Darkness feeling very much like last generation's gaming wrapped up in a beautiful shell of modern graphics, superb storytelling and great level design - in the version we've played, anyway. However, there's arguably more praise in there than criticism. The Darkness may offer little new or hugely ambitious in its gameplay, but those things which it does, it does better than almost any game of this type we've played. Writing, presentation, pacing, voice acting and minute-to-minute gameplay are all excellent, based on our experience so far. Much as we love innovation, we're perfectly happy to shelve that requirement for a labour of love that simply takes all the old tricks and does them better.

Graphically, it's worth noting, The Darkness is a high point - not as stylised as Gears of War, nor as overtly beautiful, but chock full of dramatic lighting, gorgeous visual effects and imaginative, varied characters and creatures. The presentation, too, rarely misses a beat from what we've seen. One fantastic touch is that every now and then, Jackie appears in a lovingly animated scene where he simply stands in a beam of light, in a darkened room, and addresses the player with his thoughts on the plot, or an anecdote from his life. It took us nearly four hours of play to realise that these well-scripted, engrossing interludes were hiding loading delays.

You know the scenes in F.E.A.R. where you encounter SWAT teams torn apart by an evil force? This time, you get to be the evil force. Much more fun!

Of course, being a next-gen game, The Darkness wouldn't be complete without multiplayer. To that end, the game sports a comprehensive set of options for setting up various different types of game, including crowd pleasers like Deathmatch and CTF. We didn't get a chance to bring our preview code online, but we're definitely looking forward to seeing how Starbreeze has integrated Darkness powers into the online arena.