From there he teleports to a frozen laboratory, and suddenly he's back in the desert. In one level, Jericho is in the middle of the Arizona desert the next he's at an icebound outpost. Things are constantly happening in Darkwatch, stupid things which are never followed up on in any way. What the game's plot lacks in coherence and quality it more than makes up for in sheer of volume of nonsense. As if people couldn't tell for themselves that devouring someone's soul was a bad thing. Every time a moral quandary arises, the game actually tells players which is the good option and which is the evil option. For those who are worried that their moral compass isn't exactly centered, don't worry the paths are clearly marked, hilariously so. The lack of dialogue also saves the developers time and money coming up with good path and bad path responses for the main character depending on what moral choices they make during the game. Of course this only works when the character acts in a way that the player can comprehend. Giving the main character no dialogue is supposed to make him more relatable, to allow the player to more easily slip into his shoes. Yes, Jericho's quite effective at snarling and brooding during the cinema sequences, but he never evidences any actual character traits. Part of this problem stems from the fact of the game really doesn't have a main character. It is an extended showcase for one-dimensional characters, terrible dialogue, lame plot twists, and the most amazingly wrongheaded decisions I've seen anyone make since the original Dead to Rights. In addition to all of its other flaws, Darkwatch has the most hilariously bad story I've seen in a long time. How did it fail so completely? I'll tell you how: with a carefully designed two-pronged strategy of terrible storytelling and bad gameplay.Ī Wild West first-person shooter, Darkwatch tells the story of Jericho Cross, train robber-turned-day-walking half-man half-vampire.
Games with unrealized potential aren't an uncommon sight these days, and Darkwatch manages to sink below normal levels of mediocrity in order to become something far less then the sum of its parts. Yet the game manages to somehow go completely wrong.
A dynamite premise, excellent production values and art design, and a manual that contains the single greatest line of descriptive text since the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System 1. I can't remember of the last time I saw a game with as much going for it as Darkwatch. If you answered C to either of these questions you are either dangerously stupid or a member of the Darkwatch creative team. Do you,Ī) shoot the stranger in the back of the head then step over his dead body and extinguish the fuse?ī) clump the stranger in the back of the head with a gun then step over his unconscious body and extinguish the fuse?Ĭ) threaten the stranger with a gun and ask him what he's doing, wasting time and allowing the fuse to burn down and the dynamite to explode, freeing the king of the vampires?
You fight your way through them to discover a stranger who, for all you know, is behind the attack on the train, just as he lights the fuse on a bundle of dynamite, which if allowed to detonate, will set free the king of the vampires.
The train you're on has been boarded, and your compatriots have been slaughtered by the undead. You're one of the only two female members of this organization, so your large breasts strain the integrity of your skin-tight leather bodysuit. Question two: You're an employee of a vampire hunting organization, charged with protecting an important cargo. Do you:ī) run screaming from the train and then have a nervous breakdown because the basic elements that support your belief in a rational world governed by science have been stripped away from you?Ĭ) continue on your train robbery without comment, shooting monsters as you find them? You climb aboard a train and discover that all of the passengers have been brutally slaughtered by reanimated skeletons wielding sickles. Question one: You're a train robber who- and I can't stress this enough- does not know that monsters are really real.