So as I’m making my way through the PS2 library I seem to be finding myself drawn to games about vampires. First BloodRayne, now Darkwatch. Unlike BloodRayne, I’d never heard of Darkwatch before. I was slightly dubious at first, as I’m not a big fan of console first person shooters, and tend to prefer mouse and keyboard when I play fps’s. But as far as I can tell Darkwatch was never officially released for PC, so that wasn’t an option. Still, despite my initial misgivings, I ended up enjoying Darkwatch quite a lot.
In it you take control of Jericho, a lone outlaw who tries to rob a train at the beginning of the game. However, it turns out the train belongs to the Darkwatch, an organization meant to combat evil supernatural forces that plague the land, and the vault he tries to rob doesn’t have money or gold, but instead contains a powerful vampire called Lazarus that Jericho unwittingly sets free. Freed from his prison, Lazarus begins his new reign of terror by infecting Jericho with vampirism, and raising the dead all over the land. After receiving aid from Cassidy, an agent of the Darkwatch, Jericho must join their ranks in order to take down Lazarus, undo his mistake, and hopefully free himself from the curse placed on him.
The overall plot is a pretty typical vampire story, but it takes place in a western setting just after the end of the civil war. I must admit I’ve never seen vampires in a western setting before, and it certainly gives the game a unique and memorable style.
The gameplay involves shooting the many undead creatures Lazarus has unleashed, and the core shooting mechanics feel pretty satisfying. There’s a variety of different weapons, and while you can only carry two weapons at a time, all of them are fun to use. The enemies are also pretty creative, and while it does repeat certain kinds of encounters a lot, there’s just enough variety to prevent things from getting stale.
While the shooting is the main focus of the game, it’s also supplemented by vampire super powers, and this is where the game’s narrative and morality system comes into play. Throughout the game you’re presented with a series of moral choices, and typically this will manifest as a person who is dead or dying, and you must choose whether to save their life or send their soul to paradise, depending on how far gone they are, or whether you ruthlessly take their life force for yourself. It might seem like this sort of dichotomy would change the story, but for the most part it really doesn’t. There’s only one major choice you can make toward the end of the game that changes the climax of the story. I won’t spoil what it is, if you play this game you’ll know it when you see it. Aside from that one choice, what decisions you make doesn’t change the events of the story in any meaningful way apart from how the other characters respond to Jericho in dialogue. What the moral choices throughout the game do affect is which vampire superpowers you get.
There are eight vampire superpowers you can unlock, four good and four evil. The good and evil powers are basically the same, except that the evil powers recharge faster and are more powerful. So from a gameplay perspective the evil powers are generally more useful, with the downside being that you had to perform evil actions to get them, which is an interesting concept for a moral dilemma. In any case, it’s best to decide at the start of the game if you’re going for good or evil and sticking with that decision, as alternating will prevent you from unlocking the more useful powers later in the game, and it’s really only possible to unlock 4 or 5 of the powers during any one run.
While the story isn’t anything remarkable or terribly nuanced, it is well paced and well told, and after the trainwreck of a narrative I experienced in the BloodRayne games, it’s nice to see a game story that had some actual thought put into it.
So the gameplay is pretty good and the story is pretty good, but I wouldn’t say either one is great. There’s nothing majorly wrong with it, but it’s not exceptional either. I think the biggest issue I have with the game is that it doesn’t always feel like it knows what it wants to be. The story often seems like it wants to be a relatively serious and somewhat deep analysis of a man lost in darkness trying to recover his soul. But the moment to moment gameplay feels more like it wants to be mindless actioney fun, and fully embraces the inherent silliness of the premise. It does both aspects fairly well, but it feels like it would have been better if it could have picked a lane. Either actually try to have a deeper narrative driven experience in the mold of something like Half Life, or just accept the ridiculousness of the vampiric and undead shenanigans going on and be full on over the top mindless fun.
Still, while I wouldn’t say it’s a great game, I did end up playing through Darkwatch twice, mainly to see what would happen if I picked the evil options, and if I can enjoy a game enough to be willing to play through it twice, it must have been doing something right.
My final arbitrary score is a 6/10 (Above Average)
コメント