The Darkness (Xbox 360)

Jackie can use firearms, complete with up close and personal excellent execution moves. His Darkness powers that include, Creeping Dark, a slithering tentacle head that can move along walls Alien-Style and break locks, stealth kill, knock out lights. A demonic tentacle arm that you can use to lift heavy objects out of the way, impale enemies and break lights.

There are other powers that manifest later on, but I am not going to spoil them for you.

Jackie can also summon Darklings, demonic servants of the Darkness. These are brought in from spawn points, they should have been cool, but I felt quite let down by the Darklings actually. You have four types and they don't actually help out all that much. I found myself relying on Jackie's gun skill as well as his other powers later on in the game.

The command system for the Darklings just lets you press X and point where you want them to go, there's no way to jump between the Darkling types or control them directly (which would have been fun), especially if another player could jump in split-screen, over Live or System-Link.

The Darkling AI (which should have been pretty spot on) is actually fairly dumbed down; they're not the brightest sparks in the box of fireworks. They will run towards lights, sometimes just stand there, die for no apparent reason or completely ignore the enemy to focus on someone else further away. Even the Darkling that is supposed to knock out lights will often ignore the light that's busy frying him to get a pop at the light further away.

The game loses points from me for these problems right away.

I also have an issue with the spawn points for the Darklings. In the comic you can manifest a veritable army of these things, but baby Jackie is stuck with specific locations and they're about as useful most times as a chocolate fireguard. The only real fun use of the Darklings comes when the game's almost over.

The Darkness is packed with unlockables, doing side missions and picking up phone numbers (then dialling them on a game phone) unlocks a funny audio clip in game as well as some concept art and so on, out of game. You can find new costumes (weapons too) for your Darklings and they'll randomly appear with one of the unlocked costumes.

Starbreeze didn't quite match this game up to the gameplay of Riddick, it's almost there but the problems with the Darklings actually mar the gameplay slightly and it becomes almost frustrating. Jackie's other suite of powers is pretty much spot on and the later powers allow you to let rip against your foes true Darkness style.