The Darkness (Xbox 360)

It’s your 21st birthday; your uncle wants to kill you and evil snakes have just sprouted from your shoulders. Hopefully this won’t sound familiar to anyone, but to Jackie Estacado - mafia mover and shaker with silky locks and a voice that could smelt iron - it’s something that has to be taken in stride. Brimming with incidental details (check out the TV in the subway for engrossing examples) and adhering to a consistent streak of innovative gameplay, The Darkness is a first person shooter with the added bonus of a whacky supernatural familiar to spice things up.

Following the popular US comic of the same name, we control Jackie and his demonic hitchhiker as they scramble across a suitably decayed New York City shooting the faces off of hilariously stereotyped henchmen in a bid to track down the murderous Uncle Pauli. Gameplay is standard shooter fare, with the extra dimension of the puzzle solving and heart devouring Darkness, which keeps things fresh amid levels that have been seen before in several gaming incarnations (barring a few massively obscure story shenanigans that creep out of nowhere). Definitely worth a look if you’re a fan of the genre, if only for the fantastic graphics that show the Xbox 360 at its best.

Released 28th June 2007 by Take 2 Interactive.

Written by Andy Douglas.