Darkest of Days

A passion project that takes a great game idea most of the way to the finish line, Darkest of Days scoops up a doomed bit player from Custer’s Last Stand just before he can eat that last arrow. As the saved-by-the-future Alexander Morris, you’re put to work as an agent for KronoteK, an organization that prevents history from being tarnished by ethically challenged post-modern meddlers. That means your job is to retrieve a few slippery fish from the time stream during the American Civil War, World War I, and beyond — oh, and why not mow down hordes of primitives while you’re at it?

The green fields of Antietam and the filthy trenches of Tannenberg feature in some of the bloodiest battles in human history, and in this videogame re-enactment, realism trumps theatrics at nearly every turn — albeit with surprisingly little visible gore. You occasionally earn access to advanced weapons from the future, but more often you’re stuck with period relics that demand a deliberate approach to combat. Springfield muskets fire a single shot before needing a reload, and the Gewehr 98 infantry rifle isn’t exactly a machine gun — so making the most of every bullet is vital. Even when you’re tooled-up, you can’t spray death everywhere because soldiers marked by blue auras must survive if you’re to avoid changing history. Kill one, and you won’t earn as many points for simple weapon upgrades like accuracy and clip capacity; kill several, and warriors from the future show up to make your life miserable.

The expansive battlefields may not boast the cinematic sheen of a Call of Duty, and the framerate sometimes takes a field trip into the single digits, but it’s certainly thrilling and overwhelming to face dozens of enemy soldiers in painstakingly re-created real-world settings like the fields near Dunker Church. Battles are tough because they’re relatively true to life, and it’s really a shame that the less-than-stellar graphics don’t show off everything to better effect. Worse yet, arbitrary invisible barriers often destroy tactical freedom, and escorted allies show little common sense. In one memorable instance, my companion advised me to “tread lightly” lest I be detected…right before he opened fire on a crowd of distracted Confederates.

It’s worth putting up with these frustrations, though, because the further you get into Darkest of Days, the better it gets, until you’re capping off the main pair of campaigns with memorable visits to World War II Poland and the final moments of Pompeii. Gun-crazed gamers just looking for another run-and-shoot romp will find the plodding pace and home-spun presentation distasteful, but Darkest of Days offers everyone else enough fresh and rewarding gameplay to offset its worst problems.