Cross-eyed Moody Cowboy.
By PaulEMoz
The first-person shooter genre is definitely a bit on the stale side these days. If it’s not space marines, it’s World War II, and we’re all becoming a little bored by now. So, how can we inject a little fresh blood into the old FPS then? How about vampire cowboys? Yeah, that should do it.
Darkwatch gets off to a pretty brisk and entertaining start. From a botched train robbery straight into an escape on horseback, fending off evil skeleton riders, it’s promising stuff. And having the main enemy flying after you shouting, “I hunger” is appealingly retro. Well, it made me smile, anyway.
And he’s much scarier than anything in Darkwatch.
Still, it soon settles down into traditional territory, running around graveyards and corridors, jumping and double-jumping, and making the undead dead again. Aside from the abundance of vampiric gunslingers, there are a few other, slightly less conventional enemies along the way. For instance, an hour or so into the game, you’re accosted by a fat man who spews torrents of acidic bile at you. Blasting him into a pile of meaty chunks is probably more satisfying than it has any right to be.
“Bullet to the head, sir?”
“Fuck off, I’m full.”
There are a couple of twists that make this a little different. Instead of having a sniper sight, you have an invokable limited-time “blood sense”, which as well as helping you aim better, has the added bonus of helping you to uncover hidden objects. And then there’s the amusing ability to be able to choose between good and evil.
If you’ve ever been sick of being the good guy in a game (and let’s face it, we all have), then you’ll appreciate this. At certain points in the game, you’ll have the option of freeing a dead or poisoned soul, or just feeding on them for your own benefit. You do have to put a bit of thought into this, because your choice determines how your character powers up. It’s a nice little twist in an otherwise fairly standard effort.
“Ma, he’s making eyes at me.”
“Blow his head off, then.”
“I would if the fucking targetting system would work!”
So Darkwatch can get the blood pumping at times, but it’s certainly far from perfect. The biggest problem comes from the aiming system. If I’ve got a white crosshair that turns red when I move it over an enemy, I expect to hit that enemy when I shoot. If I miss at a distance, it’s almost acceptable. If the enemy is mere feet from the barrel of my gun, standing oblivious as I seemingly pump round after round into his head, it can be more than a little frustrating. Especially when I have to reload, and they then turn and shoot me through the face.
Another problem comes from the fact that the game is too… brown. There are a lot of corridors and canyon walls in this game, and after a while it tends to get a bit boring. Your basest shooting instinct is covered, but it rarely goes beyond that. More inspired locales would certainly have helped. Darkwatch is short, quite stylish, at times insanely enjoyable, and certainly a little flawed. But go into with your expectations set to ‘low’ and it will definitely provide you with a few hours of decent brain-off fun.
September 2005
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