Today, there's good news and bad news for fans of Starbreeze's underappreciated 2007 comic book-based shooter, The Darkness. First, the good news: A sequel, The Darkness 2, has just been announced for fall 2011, reuniting players with Darkness-packing mobster Jackie Estacado; and the bad news: Original developer Starbreeze is out, rumored to be busy with a Syndicate reboot for EA, and relatively unproven Digital Extremes (Dark Sector, anyone?) is in.
The sequel promises more of what made the original such a delight: giant Demon Arms and "stylistic violence." The Darkness 2 marketing team got their hands on the game and came up with "Quad-Wielding," which seems as sellable as any other first-person gimmick. "The Darkness II breaks out of the sea of conventional first-person shooters," the press release reads, "with its fervid Quad-Wielding gameplay, which will allow players to slash, grab, and throw objects and enemies with their Demon Arms while simultaneously firing two weapons."
That's all well and good, but how cool is the game? For that, we'll turn to the admittedly biased Marc Silvestri, founder and CEO of Top Cow Productions and co-creator of The Darkness comics. "So often disappointed when a favorite character gives birth to a lame movie or video game, us fans have come to expect the worst," Silvestri said. "And sometimes we get it. But not with The Darkness II. Yeah, call me biased [Ed's note: We did!], but this second installment of Jackie Estacado's epic saga is – in my humble opinion – one of the most brutally cool games I've ever played. 2K Games hammered this one out of the park."
As convincing as that sounds, we'll reserve our judgment until we get our hands (and yes, our Demon Arms) on the title.
