I try to find the best in every game I play, much like I try to find the good in everyone, despite their faults. When it comes to Darkest of Days, however, it's hard to find those good qualities when the game is constantly slapping you around, demanding your attention, and noticing all the sloppy gameplay and technical limitations and glitches that plague this game. It's a game that is so frustratingly bad I put down my controller, flipped it the bird, and cussed it out when I was done.

You play as a solider, who was gunned down during the Battle of Little Bighorn, but who is rescued by a man stepping out of a glowing sphere of mercury just moments before you die. You find yourself in the future, now a soldier of a time traveling corporation, who uses MIAs from major moments in history to be their testers and gophers. The company specializes in going back into the past to see how things disappeared and solve mysteries, but when the founder of the technology goes missing, it's up to you to travel to various battles, looking for this Father of Time, and trying to save people (who aren't supposed to die at that time) from being killed off by some strange faction of soldiers.

Worst Weapon Ever

I was really looking forward to playing Darkest of Days, mainly because the story behind the game sounded so cool I had to play it. The idea of a MIA soldier traveling through time, fighting in various historically significant wars, and doing so with futuristic weapons and technology sounded too good to pass up on. The story of Darkest of Days carried the game for a little, but then it dovetails and even the story isn't enough to make me want to keep playing. You also start to pick apart the problems, such as the ease in which you find yourself becoming a pawn in this corporation's needs. If you were to be abducted in your time and thrown into the future, wouldn't you be freaked the hell out? Plus, despite all guns having a trigger you squeeze in order to make a boom, you shouldn't be able to handle advanced sci-fi weaponry with little to no training. Oh, and when you wield high-tech weaponry in front of other people, why don't they wonder what that is and how you came to have it?

A game can get by, however, even when it's lacking a compelling story, as long as the gameplay is engrossing and fun. Darkest of Days is instead a frustrating look at all the terrible trappings that make a game bad. If you have any desire to make games for a living, please do yourself the favor of renting this game, playing it, and then doing the exact opposite of everything you see here.

Controls are pretty normal for a first-person shooter, where the right trigger shoots, left trigger zooms in, you can duck, sprint, switch weapons, etc. The problem is that the controls are mapped in weird ways, which doesn't feel natural. If you want to duck, for instance, you have to keep the thumbstick pressed to crouch, because otherwise you'll pop right back up into a standing position (why clicking the thumbstick doesn't toggle crouch on and off is beyond me). Then you have the map button, which is attached to the Back button, which you also have to hold to keep displayed. I don't know about you, but the Back button is a left thumb hit for me, which makes it impossible to both walk and check your map at the same time. Plus, if you want to run to get there quicker while holding the map, you've now got three buttons (all in the same vicinity) you need to keep pressed and held to perform that one little function.

Combat isn't any better and in fact it's quite worse. While zooming in with the left trigger does help somewhat, it's by no means a perfect system. I can have a character dead in my crosshairs, pull the trigger, and it's like nothing shot them. Other times I can shoot my gun, not even properly aiming at someone, and yet they'll go down. You can also use grenades from time-to-time, but the animation is so poor and the grenades float so slowly through their arc it's ridiculous. Another problem is that because of the graphical styling of the game and its technical limitations, it's impossible to really distinguish a bad guy from a good guy unless one shoots you. You've got a homing system of sorts to indicate where damage is coming from, but even it's broken. I started a level, ran forward a bit, and suddenly got shot from behind. I turned around to where the threat was indicated and there was nothing there but my fellow soldiers on horseback, who then proceeded to run through me…wow…just wow.

Another major problem with the combat comes from the weaponry and gameplay system. Most of the action takes place in the Civil War and World War 1, so you don't generally have the best weaponry. During the Civil War portion, for instance, you are often left using a one-shot rifle. So imagine being surrounded, shooting once, and then having to watch a few seconds for a reloading animation just so you can shoot again. The game has got a reload timing mechanism like seen in Gears of War, but nowhere near as well done, and its accuracy is often so small you're usually best left letting the whole thing cycle through. The game also features a weapon upgrade system, which rewards you points for upgrading weapons (though upgrading seems to matter little) based on how you handle blue soul soldiers.

Umm

The premise is that there are people within these battles that don't die there. Oh, you can kill everyone you want for the most part, as they're supposed to die there, but these are supposed to survive. If you see a soldier appear on the screen with a blue flame aura around them you have one of two options: 1) throw pop balls, or 2) shoot them in the legs. Throwing little green balls from the future that pop like tiny firecrackers is the best way, but you have to be close enough to throw them, they have to be in the general vicinity, and then it takes so long to recall them you start to wonder about why even bothering. You can go for shots in the leg, however, though that often kills them instead of immobilizing them. The funny thing is that other NPC characters (or even the freaking enemies themselves) will often kill these special soldiers, which count against you. What the hell?

As for the technical side of things and all those problems, you've got character models that look about the same as those from the original Half-Life, character animations that make highly trained soldiers look like a bunch of idiots running, distant environmental objects that pop in and out of play, constant slowdown, fences you can hurdle by merely running into them, and invisible walls everywhere you look. Try to climb a hill – invisible wall. Try to go down a hill – invisible wall. Try to go through an open gate – AN INVISIBLE WALL! Other problems I've ran into include my character continuously slightly walking to the left for no reason despite nothing being pressed, enemies you can bypass the scripted moments for that render them helpless (you can go right behind their heads without them noticing you), and then bypassing some moments so that the game breaks, you have no odds of winning, and then must load an earlier game. As for audio, the voice actors are terrible, voice acting audio is proportional to where they are in relation to you (so sometimes you can't hear anything they're saying), and weapons sound like the toys of children rather than mean instruments of death. The best part is trying to read the subtitles for text when the voices can't be heard, but yet you cant read what's being said because the orange is so light it blends into everything in the environment.

Playing Darkest of Days was downright painful and agonizing. The only solace I can take is the fact that by me playing the game and telling you how dreadful and painfully bad it is, not only am I protecting your wallet, but I'm protecting your precious time and sanity too. Darkest of Days is an abomination of a game that fails in every aspect. I'm trying to think of a game for comparison sake that is just as bad or worse than this game, but for the life of me I can't think of anything. I think this may just be the worst game I've ever had the misfortune to play.

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