How mistaken I was. Blending fast-paced God of War-style brawling combat with spells, elves and death knells, Reckoning is one of the most exciting new RPGs I’ve played in years, and probably one of the most accomplished  conjuring-up’s of the Tolkin-esqe spirit that marks a truly great fantasy world.

In the Kingdoms of Amalur, everyone has a set destiny. This is pretty depressing for mankind as a whole, who know they’re destined to be defeated by a homicidal race of evil fae creatures, though it’s particularly depressing for you, because you’re dead. Fortunately it’s not too long before you un-kick the bucket when a gnome playing the role of Frankenstein brings you back to life.

This leaves you in an interesting position. Having died, your destiny was fulfilled. Now that you’re alive again however, your future is a blank slate. And so you are let loose upon the world of Amalur, ready to screw up other people’s destinies left right and centre, track down your killer, and maybe save the world along the way.

This lack of destiny also stops you from being tied down to your class choices. Fancy playing as a sword-wielding brute who bonks people on the head until they go dead? Go ahead. Suddenly feel like playing a sneaky-wizard who throws fireballs and creeps around with double daggers? You can swap over whenever you feel like it. This helps tie story into gameplay, making it easy for a character who up until now has specced magic to go team up with the local thieves and assassins.

It’s unlikely you’ll find yourself short of things to do, factions to team up with, or worlds to save (alright, admittedly there may be only one world to save). The game world is huge and all of its towns, dungeons and quests feel like they’ve been handcrafted by a developer with a lot of tlc. The fast-paced combat is what sets it apart though; transforming what in other games would have been a tedious fetch quest that involved you hitting a bear with a metal stick until it was dead, into a frenetic life-or-death battle with a worthy ursine foe.

Some other good old fashioned fantasy tropes pop up with a new twist: there’s plenty of the old-fashioned elf/human racism, which tend to make people’s initial reactions to you in the first town amusingly unpleasant, should you choose to play as an elf. You can aid ensorcelled wolves, defeat vile Wizards and help damsels in distress. But most importantly, the character creator lets you create a medieval version of Doctor Watson, complete with amazing mustache. I mean, what possible reason could you have for not wanting to go run around as Doctor John Watson, Wizard?

You can be fantasy this guy.

I guess the highest compliment I could give Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is that about two hours into the preview build I was playing, I became acutely aware that I just wanted to grab a full copy and sink tens of hours into it without stopping. In a market with no shortages of quality RPGs, Reckoning is definitely one to look out for.

Find more cool art by Les McClaine at www.evilspacerobot.com

But before diving into the terribly misjudged single-player, let’s get the multiplayer offerings out of the way. After all, undoubtedly the vast majority of people who’ve purchased Modern Warfare 3 will be doing so primarily for the multiplayer. As someone who enjoyed Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer for a time, I can reliably inform you that (just like predecessors Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops) it’s pretty much the same as it’s been for the past 4 years. Fundamental flaws with the whole FPS/RPG mashup have yet to see any resolution. It’s always been glaringly obvious that rewarding those who have more time to put into the game (and thus further develop their skills) with increasingly powerful weapons and perks utterly disincentives anyone new to the game to continue playing after the first few times they finish a round with 2 kills and 12 deaths. Consequentially the player base inevitably suffers from the law of diminishing returns as it contracts in upon itself. The hardcore soon start to find themselves starved of the easy newb-meat on which they grew fat in the first few months of the game’s launch. The way the publisher and developers have sought to get around this is to churn out a new iteration on an annual basis, which solves the mystery of why the multiplayer has barely changed in 5 years.

Actually the new Spec Ops survival mode is pretty fun, even if it is just the Zombies mode from the Treyarch games but with Zombies swapped for guys with guns. On the other hand the Spec Ops missions that were the highlight of Modern Warfare 2 are astonishingly difficult. Unlike Modern Warfare 2, which had a steady difficulty curve that helped prepare you for the increasingly tough challenges ahead, Modern Warfare 3 just starts off ridiculously hard and it only gets worse from there.

With the multiplayer being at best more of the same, let’s turn our gaze towards the single-player. This is where we fall with a vengeance into the realm of the Call of Duty 4 comparisons. In that installment you played the role of two protagonists: a US marine in a generically middle-eastern city (obviously meant to be somewhere in Iraq) fighting insurgents, and a new SAS recruit deployed in Russia who has to track down the leader of powerful Ultranationalist fringe group in the middle of a civil war. There was a real sense of impending doom as national tensions mounted and you realized that failure in your quest to prevent this escalation could have devastating global consequences. This was particularly underlined in an astonishing sequence in which your marine character gets caught up in a disastrously unsuccessful mission with the consequence of a nuclear bomb going off.  You survive crawling out of a crashed helicopter to observe the all-encompassing devastation, just before you die of radiation poisoning. It’s hard not to treat the threat of nuclear war with a greater sense of gravitas after that once you’ve become a victim of it.

When considering the accomplishments of the first entry in the franchise, it becomes clear how far the third game has fallen. The game drops you off in the middle of World War 3 after a quick catch-up of all the idiocy that occurred in Modern Warfare 2. A Russian terrorist frames an American spy for a terrorist attack in a Russian airport, and the Russian President decides that the only sensible way to respond to this is to invade America. The first thing with which the game slaps you in the face is an image of war-torn New York. The allegorical imagery wouldn’t be so problematic if it was actually saying something. Instead Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer decided to have a bunch of 9/11 imagery to ramp up the excitement of the denouement in which you highjack a Russian submarine off the shore of Manhattan. It’s a patently nonsensical masturbatory military fantasy that would by no means look out of place in a Michael Bay film, and on those grounds I would normally cut its idiotic storytelling some slack.

But Modern Warfare 3 is a different and altogether more odious case. It follows in the footsteps of its equally bombastic and mentally-challenged predecessor Modern Warfare 2, which featured an interactive murder-civilians-in-an-airport sequence for absolutely no purpose at all. The game tries to have it both ways, but you just can’t get away with pretending that you’re just a big stupid schlocky war scenario that no-one’s suppose to take too seriously, and yet have a sequence where you play as an American tourist on holiday in London filming his family, who then gets to see his daughter get blown up by a Russian car-bomb. Nor can you get away with a sequence in which, whilst sneaking through Prague, you’re forced to watch Russian soldiers execute prisoners-of-war. If you do this, you lose the right to portray yourself as just a bit of bang-bang-shooty-shooty fun.

If you’re going to show scenes that should horrify and repulse a human being as part of your big entertainment package, then I’m damn well going to call you on it. If anyone from Infinity Ward or Sledgehammer happens to be reading this, then you should be ashamed of yourself. Not for just churning out a series of repetitive games that serve to desensitize us to the horrors of war in favour of just seeing it as some sort of stupid entertainment, but for specifically going out of your way to show us reprehensible acts being committed for absolutely no reason, other than to dehumanise the Russian soldiers you kill and get you pumped up to go and kill some more. Considering Infinity Ward’s pedigree that largely consisted of World War 2 games, it’s understandable why they did this. But that doesn’t make it acceptable.

The fact of the matter is that Modern Warfare 3 has already broken all the previous sales records for the Call of Duty franchise, and I’m sure that whatever comes next will continue the trend. It’s hard not to be disheartened when everything that I consider reprehensible in video-games makes a shed-load of money. I guess I’ll have to comfort myself with the fact that most people play it for the multiplayer, and hope that Activision manages to run this franchise as thoroughly into the ground as they’ve done to Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk.

The game is set after the impact of an unfortunately sized asteroid in 2029. Humanity’s best and brightest have been stuck in a freezer and buried underground awaiting the earth’s return to some state of semi-habitability. At a specified point an alarm clock was meant to go off and propel the Ark survivors into the brave new world waiting for them up above. It was presumably a clerical error on the part of the Ark personnel department to add a disturbed silent killing machine to the expensive underground vault filled with scientists and doctors. Embodying this mute killing machine, you emerge to discover that it’s all gone a bit Mad Max in your absence. It’s not too long before John Goodman (Walter from The Big Lebowski) gives you a gun and tells you to go murder a bunch of people to whom he’s none too partial (including a clan of inexplicably British petrolheads).

In fact, the first mission serves as a bizarre microcosm of the entire Rage experience. There are survivors and bandits. Everything is run by an evil dystopian government unimaginatively called The Authority. Unsurprisingly, everyone wants to kill you. About halfway through the game a significant plot detail regarding the origins of The Authority is revealed in a surprisingly blasé aside. Not that this really matters, because the story in Rage is pretty much sold to you at face value: “go over there, flick switch/grab item, kill everyone on the way and then come back to me.” I know a lot of games that try to shoe-horn in RPG elements often just end up relying on fetch quests, but Id is owned by Bethesda now, perhaps the premiere western RPG makers – couldn’t they have given some advice on how to make a storyline that isn’t just a giant chain of fetch-quests?

During those fetch quests you get to fight a lot of mutants, all of whom have impressive animated entrances into the battlefield, often featuring somersaults or the splits, but then just run straight at you trying to shank you. Unsurprisingly, the solution to this particular gameplay dilemma is just to run backwards and put a shotgun blast into them. It’s not until a third of the way through the game that you first get to fight the Authority’s enforcers, power-armour wearing goons, who sport sufficient firepower to actually make you think on your feet during combat. There was hardly any occasion that made me feel the need to resort to any weapon other than the shotgun.

Ah, that shotgun. If Rage has one shining point it’s the shotgun you get early on. Now there’s a weapon whose look, sound, retort and firepower all seem perfectly crafted to make you feel like the baddest baddass in the wasteland. Every time you pull the trigger, for just a moment, you feel like you’re projecting the explosive will of John Carmack (Doom, Quake and Rage’s lead designer) out into the world, to wreak havoc upon the poor, soon-to-be-tenderised flesh of your enemies. Considering that it can basically be turned into a rocket launcher to deal with the tougher enemies, I really found no better weapon in the game, not even the rubbish version of a BFG they give you in the last 10 seconds.

But despite the awesomeness of the shotgun, its lustre certainly begins to go a little dim after you’ve had to use it to blow away what feels like the 4000th identical mutant. Considering how little scope the game’s tight linear shooting galleries have, the lack of interesting foes to vanquish really dampens your enthusiasm. You end up carrying out the same formula again and again. Drive though the dull and utterly superfluous open-world to a door somewhere in the wasteland and then have a half-an-hour shootout. Rinse and repeat.

If you get bored of shooting, there’s a surprisingly large amount of races in which you can participate that provide a brief diversion. These provide race certificates to upgrade your vehicle, which means that once you go back into the open world your new engine will get you from point A to B a bit faster, or your boost will last slightly longer. Whilst there are some well designed races that have you soaring across towering canyons or attempting to boost across a crevasse, the majority of them make you take part in boring car-combat or repeat rally-races. There’s no real difference in the driver AI as the races progress unless you choose to increase the overall difficulty of the game. If you want to try your hand at the multiplayer (pretty much the only multiplayer mode other than a set of short and boring co-op scenarios) you’ll have much the same experience with bizarrely-devised objectives that leave the game overly-reliant on its insipid car-combat. In short, despite how much time and effort you put into the vehicles, it’s not going to provide a racing experience in any way on a par with a proper racing game, and ultimately it’s nowhere near unique enough to stand up on its own.

During the process of writing this review I came to the realisation that I had completely forgotten to mention one of Rage’s most trumpeted features: its visuals. Using the new id Tech 5 engine, Id has managed to craft a series of extremely attractive landscapes. The first few times you race across the wasteland it’s easy to let your mind wander from the monotony of the driving to the beauty of the great craggy peaks and their destroyed elegance that lie far beyond the horizon (or the boundaries of the map as the case may be).

However, the fact that I almost forgot to mention them proves that whilst beguiling, the graphics certainly weren’t astonishing enough to distract me from the game’s numerous flaws. Not everything looks as pretty as the backdrops. The majority of the ruined buildings that you are forced to explore are predominantly boring shades of brown and grey, and with the majority of the npc’s looking and acting like lifeless manikins. It’s also incredibly easily to break the game’s rendering engine on consoles and most pc’s; just spinning on the spot will cause the game to frantically try to keep up with you, revealing dodgy-looking texture pop-in left and right. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but none of the visuals in Rage ever conjured up the feelings of jaw-dropping awe in the way achieved by games such as Uncharted or Crysis. At a time when developers are constantly managing to eke every last scrap of performance out of the now familiar consoles, Rage didn’t make that much of an impression.

Rage is a game that has been in development for a fair bit of time, and it seems to have suffered as a result. The story and world-building have clearly been put on the back-burner, and gameplay elements feel like they’ve been designed in a void, and then shoved together like an ill-crafted jigsaw. Bad enough that these disparate bits of gameplay are dull and unambitious on their own, but put together they create an incohesive mess that succeeds only in causing boredom and frustration. Id seem to have become victims of their own previous successes. Rage is neither good enough as a shooter nor is the world it creates sufficiently appealing to want to spend time in it.

We’ve been starved of a good British spy film for quite a while now. Johnny English Reborn, sequel to 2003’s Johnny English, delivers a good performance from Rowan Atkinson, but seems to be unsure if it wants to be a spy-spoof or an actual spy film.

The humour in Johnny English Reborn simply isn’t up to scratch. Jokes are repeated far too often, and are visibly telegraphed. There’s set-up right at the beginning for a joke about getting kicked in the balls that I saw coming about an hour and a half before its use. Whereas the first Johnny English rather masterfully bombarded you with a constant stream of slap-stick and embarrassing humour, Johnny English Reborn never quite manages to find the right note to make you laugh.

The film kicks off with the inept British superspy having left MI7 in disgrace, after a botched mission causes the death of an African premier. Now, no longer Sir Johnny, he visits a Tibetan monastery to rediscover himself. After the pre-requisite training montage, he’s summoned back to London by MI7 post- haste for a mission that only he could possibly carry out.

It’s here that the film drops its first clanger of a joke. Apparently the intelligence services have been sponsored by Toshiba. Johnny walks into MI7 headquarters to find it renamed Toshiba British Intelligence Service, manned in the manner of a computer repair call-centre. Quite why we’re supposed to find this amusing is never explained (perhaps it’s because they put their logo, “Spying for you” on their parachutes) though it’s not long before English is off on a mission to stop a cadre of international assassins from killing the Chinese leader.

It’s here that things start going wrong with the film. With a less-than-excellent supporting cast (despite a good turn by Dominic West as the new Agent One) Rowan Atkinson has a much harder time when he has to effectively carry the film single-handedly. The excellent Ben Miller sadly doesn’t return, and is instead replaced as English’s sidekick by new agent Tucker (Daniel Kaluyaa) who does a lot of being the suffering straight man and even more of delivering particularly unfunny lines. Gillian Anderson does a turn as the new straight-laced head of MI7, whilst former Bond-girl Rosamund Pike plays the love interest that the film thrusts on Johnny English with but the thinnest of excuses to properly explain why they fall for each other (or in this case, why she falls for Johnny).

Despite the film’s various flaws, it still manages to be a mostly entertaining romp. The storyline of the mysterious cabal who may have infiltrated MI7 plays out quite well, and the film manages to have a fair few chase sequences and fight scenes that grab the occasional laugh, though there’s barely any jokes that you’ll be remembering and chuckling about the next day.

Indeed that’s probably the most damning criticism I could give Johnny English Reborn. When it tries to be a spy film it doesn’t do anything that stands out and its jokes miss as often as they get a laugh. Rowan Atkinson is a brilliant physical comedy actor, and this film simply doesn’t give him much to do. At times its lack of good gags makes it feel like a typical spy film, and it’s certainly not going to be challenging James Bond or Jason Bourne anytime soon.

Despite this poor second effort, I still find myself hoping there will be a third, hopefully better than the weak retread of the first film that is Johnny English Reborn. Maybe it’s because (unlike most critics) I really enjoyed the first Johnny English. I still find myself singing the original film’s theme song, A Man For All Seasons – there’s a lack of a good theme in Reborn either.

Of course things don’t go as planned, and what follows is little more than a thin excuse to replay Dead Rising 2 with some slightly altered dialogue and cut-scenes. Instead of Chuck being framed for the outbreak, now the zombie-rights group CURE is set to take the blame. The villainous TV presenter TK is still, well, the villain, and despite some interesting cameos from previous Dead Rising characters, little else is changed. Fat Frank runs around saving survivors, defeating psychopaths, and crafting combo-weapons. The photography mechanic from the first Dead Rising returns, but the xp rewards for taking pictures are negligible, and massacring zombies with combo weapons will almost always be a better choice for levelling up than taking pictures.

The majority of the changes to Off The Record deal with faults in the game design (and thus give you the rather unpleasant feeling that they probably could have been patched in). Yes, there are a handful of new combo weapons and a new theme-park based area wittily named “The Uranus Zone,” but the most important additions are the ones that make the Dead Rising experience a little more tolerable. You are now warned when a pursuing survivor is too far away to follow you into a new area, and automatic checkpoints take place every time you enter a new area, defeat a psychopath or complete a case. This definitely helps ameliorate the blinding rage that can rise when you and a party of survivors have the misfortune to run into a psychopath who immediately goes for the defenceless aged grandma you were carrying about. Some may decry this as detracting from the overall “Dead Rising-ness” of the experience, but those lunatics can content themselves with the fact that the boss fights are still awful and the survivors are about as safety conscious as babies left alone in a bathtub.

The load times have been dramatically improved, but that doesn’t come as much consolation when you’re forced to sit through two load screens every time you want to drop a survivor off at the safehouse and then get back to exploring. Would it have been that difficult to add a designated “safe zone” in which survivors would automatically depart through the ventilation shafts into safety, rather than make you load into the safehouse and then back out again?

The addition of a sandbox mode is probably the most memorable and enjoyable new feature. This lets you run around the whole of Fortune City with no time limit. You can take as long as you want to murder zombies, kill psychopaths and track down essential items, as well as tackling a huge array of challenges designed for both single and co-op play. These vary from races to zombie-killing extravaganzas, and provide a fresh way to apply Dead Rising’s mechanics to the art of zombie slaughter. XP and money carry over from the sandbox to the story and vice-versa, making it much easier to prepare Frank West for the trials and tribulations of the various story missions. It’s the consequence-free opportunity to mess around that’s been missing since the first game.

Dead Rising 2 was a flawed game, but one that managed to skirt by a lot of its problems due its charm and the fairly unique experience it offered. There really is little else in gaming quite like Dead Rising. Unfortunately, revisiting the same space and the same story makes the very flaws you previously overlooked seem far more pronounced. Your tolerance for the terrible boss fights and repetitious level grinding may find itself severely tested once you’ve replayed the initial content somewhere in the region of 5 times just to level up. In fact for a game that’s so focused on revisiting the early sections of the game, it’s mind-boggling that the developers couldn’t figure out a way to let you skip the lengthy introduction sequence (most manage this by pressing start).

Off The Record may hold some value for those who missed the original Dead Rising 2, but it belittles the experience for people who played through the original flawed gem. Depending on how able you are to cope with a re-tread of Dead Rising 2, you may enjoy Off The Record. But frankly, after my 4th Dead Rising experience in little more than a year, I can safely say that I didn’t.

Also in distinctly awesome news you can find my review of Johnny English Reborn in the London Student Newspaper! Sadly I can’t post an link to an online version yet, but you can read it in print in the LS right now (spoiler warning: I couldn’t recommend it).

Anyway, keep following Big Head Mode for preachy editorials and irrelevantly late reviews! (note to self, start begging PR’s for review copies of games…)

Indy had fun shooting and whipping Nazis, but in Uncharted shooting a seemingly infinite army of pirates never actually manages to be any fun. If this was just an adventure game with the occasional puzzle it wouldn’t matter, but for an action adventure game that largely relies on “stop-and-pop” shooting mechanics, bad gunplay is a kiss of death.

Filling the shoes of young treasure hunter and bon vivant Nathan Drake, you have to navigate tombs and murder hundreds of lightly armed pirates on your way to discovering the lost treasure of Sir Francis Drake. Whilst the environments are shockingly beautiful and a joy to explore, bumping into any of the aforementioned pirates ruins the fun completely. Their t-shirts must conceal highly effective bullet-sponges, requiring them to be filled with unreasonable amount of lead as they duck and like scalded chimps the moment you open fire on them. The unwieldy melee combat doesn’t provide much of an alternative.

For Uncharted’s one major flaw it has dozens of positives. Drake and his leading lady, the tough but likeable Elena are both superbly well written and benefit from voice-acting that sets the standard for engaging performances. The graphics are so pretty it’s all you can do to not just stop and gawp off into the jungle. It’s just a shame that the combat often serves to ruin the experience.

So yes, it’s hard. But unlike many other games that might irritate or infuriate with unpredictable see-sawing in difficulty levels, Ninja Gaiden makes it clear from the beginning that you are in for a challenge. Indeed the whole pleasure from Ninja Gaiden comes from the learning curve it puts you through, forcing you to improve your play on multiple levels. You have to think tactically about the various battles you’ll be taking part in, which weapons and spells are for the job, as well as improving your reflexes and dexterity with the controller. There were many days playing the first Ninja Gaiden that I’d walk home from school unconsciously making the motion for the Flying Swallow attack (Jump, Forwards & Y) or the counter attack for the amazing strap-on Wolverine claws in the second game.

One thing Ninja Gaiden has never been about is the story. The first had a bare bones plot about the theft of an ancient evil artefact that did a passable job at conveying you from A to B via a series of increasingly intense battles and different environments, but the second game completely jettisoned any pretence of making sense. It featured an even less coherent plot, a buxom blond love interest who walked around in leather S&M gear that would put a professional dominatrix to shame (who apparently works for the CIA), the sudden unexplained appearance of protagonist Ryu Hayabusa’s father, Joe Hayabusa (Yes, Joe) and plenty of other utterly nonsensical boss fights and baddies to overcome.

Which makes new director Fumihiko Yasuda statements that he’s including a new easy “Hero” mode that adds automatic dodging and blocking because “We really wanted to flesh out the story this time around, so we wanted people to enjoy that story and get used to the game as it is,” extremely disappointing. Ninja Gaiden never has and almost certainly never will have a story that makes a lick of sense. It certainly will never prove to be the main attraction of the series. Yasuda notes that “In the past the games were really hardcore and we couldn’t get players to stay with us and complete the game.” Talk about completely failing to understand the target audience! Trying to market Ninja Gaiden as some sort of easy character-action adventure that will provide a fun romp is completely disingenuous. People don’t play Ninja Gaiden because of a deep emotional connection to Ryu Hayabusa (who has to be one of the most dull, stoic protagonists in game history) – they play it because of the pleasure they gain from overcoming a difficult challenge. Trying to market the third entry in the series to some sort of new audience who think they’ll have an enjoyable experience in a ninja game is foolish.

The re-release of the first Ninja Gaiden on Xbox, Ninja Gaiden Black, added a much clamoured-for easy mode. It was accessible only after a number of deaths, it was called Ninja Dog, and made you play the rest of the game wearing a pink ribbon. It called your skills and your self-esteem into question – it let you know that you weren’t quite good enough to play the game properly. If Ninja Gaiden 3 loses sight of the contemptuous, sneering attitude with which it regards its players, it will be to its detriment. Team Ninja should focus on making the most bloody, graphically splendid balls-to-the-wall challenge for Ninja Gaiden 3, not a compelling story arc about a ninja who fights demons. This is one case where we’re here for the game, not the sub-anime excuse for a story.

Thanks to Joystiq for the Fumihiko Yasuda quotes.

The Darkness II immediately goes out of its way to make you feel like a supernatural killing machine. In the first Darkness game, despite having some pretty nifty supernatural powers (such as a pair of infinite ammo pistols or detachable tentacle arms that could sneak up on foes and rip their hearts’ out) you never were particularly tough. It always felt like the best way to tackle an encounter with the enemy was to shoot out the lights and then slowly creep up on them. In the Darkness II, by virtue of the new “quad-wielding” mechanic (which lets you use both hands to shoot and an independent pair of Darkness tentacles) you immediately feel like a one man wrecking-crew. You can shoot one target whilst throwing a car door at another, or grab a hapless enemy to use as a human shield with your Darkness arms whilst unloading a hail of lead into his companions. In short, the new Darkness makes you feel like a comic-book anti-hero, an unstoppable force of nature.

Taking place a few years after the events of the first game, which saw Jackie rise to the top of the New York-based Franchetti family to become the new Don. Unsurprisingly the road to the top was paved in blood, a notable casualty being Jackie’s girlfriend Jenny. A penitent Jackie initially refuses to use the Darkness anymore, however an escalating gang war quickly puts paid to his desire to give-up his supernatural killing-powers. It’s not long before a group called the Brotherhood takes advantage of a Goodfellas-style shootout in a packed restaurant to try to steal the Darkness from Jackie, starting a new conflict between the wielder of the Darkness and those who would take it from him.

With battle now joined, Jackie can use the Darkness in ingeniously inventive new ways. Mauling, slashing and shooting enemies all provides experience for a skill tree that upgrades Jackie’s powers (though, as in the first game, you have to consume your fallen foes’ hearts if you want to grow stronger). The combat gains an additional layer of complexity with enemies that are actually intelligent enough to use light against you, causing the Darkness to hide within you. At times this means you’ll rely only have your aim to rely on. This forces a number of tactical shootouts in which occupying enemies’ attention for long enough to turn off the lights and unleash the full power of the Darkness becomes a serious concern. Fortunately the ability to summon demonic helpers and use the environment against your foes also returns to amusing effect.

The new visual style deserves mention as well. Though not quite cell-shading, it’s heavily influenced by comic-book drawings, giving the characters bold black outlines and animated appearances that excellently captures the feeling of playing a comic-book character. The environments are also beguiling; with a new focus on exploration further encouraging you to go out of your way to examine your surroundings.

The Darkness II seems to be shaping up into one of next year’s more exciting releases, with an exceedingly violent new combat system and an intriguing story. As a big Top Cow comics fan I was unable to get any hints from the friendly but tight-lipped PR demoing the game as to whether we might see other staples of the Darkness’ world such as the Angelus or the Witchblade. With the story once again in the hands of veteran comic-book scribe Paul Jenkins and a plethora of excellent dialogue, tense confrontations and chilling appearances of Jackie’s departed girlfriend Jenny it looks like the Darkness II is one to look out for next year.