Darkest of Days review

Title	Darkest of Days
Developer	8monkey Labs
Publisher	Phantom EFX
Price	$39.99 (PC) $49.99 (Xbox 360)
Platform	Xbox 360 (reviewed), PC

Do you know how many soldiers died at Little Big Horn? Neither do I. (Editor's note: about 270 US soldiers.)Darkest of Days, and while it's interesting on its surface, the game itself doesn't seem to want to explore the concepts it's built around. The story of the battle may be rattling around in our brains, but the specifics? Forget about it. If you have mastered time travel and are looking for someone to do your dirty work, why not zip back to that fateful day, grab someone who would have died, heal their wounds in the future, and then put them to work stitching up the ripped fabric of time? That's the premise of

The first issue? If you actually did have a man in futuristic armor pop into a battlefield and grab someone, what would that person think? Would their mind break? What would they think of the view screen through which they get their orders between missions? Darkest of Days keeps your character mute, and he seems to simply shrug and accept everything that's happening to him. He's sent to various wars to rescue people who can't die in order to keep the timeline safe, and the specifics of each conflict are explained to him as if he has our working knowledge of geography and politics.

It would be interesting to see our hero's newfound bosses explain what a shotgun is, talk about what led to each conflict and where they took place, or help him deal with the fact he's alone in a world he has no understanding of. Instead everyone treats the setup like this sort of thing happens everyday. The dialog itself sounds as if it were written by someone who speaks English as a second language, and if you turn on subtitles you'll be treated to a number of misspelled words and typos. Classy.

The game uses the brand new Marmoset engine, written specifically for this title, and the main feature seems to be the ability to show many enemies onscreen at once. The problem is the graphics, to put it bluntly, are ugly. On the 360 version the framerate is inconsistent, with a good amount of screen tearing and tiny pauses when you do something as simple as pull up the map or look down the barrel of your gun. This would have been impressive on the PC around five years ago, but doesn't get the job done these days.

Invisible walls also make an appearance; it's not rare to be stopped dead in your tracks while moving over the countryside towards your goal because the developer wanted you to go the other way. In one scene you're asked to hold off an advancing force, which proved rather easy. I thought it would be fun to head a few feet in front of the fortified position in order to make the battle a little more interesting, but I was stopped dead in my tracks by an invisible wall.