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There seems to be a general consensus amongst the gaming populace (at least those who care) that the western is a woefully underrepresented genre. In this case, High Moon Studios has gone above and beyond the call of duty and not only given us a western game, but a vampire western! Naturally, at the first mention of vampire cowboys I knew I had to play it.
The story (if you could call it that) has you playing has Jericho Cross, a train-robber on the western frontier. On what soon becomes his last heist, he breaks into a train owned by Darkwatch, a secret army that keeps humanity safe from supernatural forces, and unwittingly unleashes Lazarus, one of the most dangerous vampires on the planet. As thanks for your folly Lazarus turns Jericho into one of the living dead. Now Jericho must join Darkwatch to get revenge on Lazarus and choose whether he walk the path of redemption or damnation.
At first the game looks really good with most of the environments possesing a unique rustic gothic feel, with lots of crosses and worked iron. However, once the first few levels pass the rest of the game is spent trudging through bland deserts and boring ghost towns.
On the technical side of things, the game is not visually impressive in the least. The style of character models are inconsistent with enemies being realistic but somewhat exagerated, which I really liked, but the living characters are all ugly (Jericho's being the absolute worst) and the texturing leaves a lot to be desired. Levels begin to run together after you get to Darkwatch HQ since most of them do nothing to distinguish themselves.
There isn't an excessive amount of voice acting in the game (mostly because you'll only be fighting corpses) and what little there is is laughable since the game is filled with shallow stock characters. The main villain, Lazarus, follows the formula of bad guy monologue so well he might as well be quoting the Guide to Villainous Dialog and the Darkwatch members sound like redneck stereotypes which makes me wonder how the hell they managed to capture Lazarus in the first place!
The soundtrack consists of Ennio Morricone's theme from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” which plays on the main menu and not much else. As for the actual game, music is especially sparce and plays during a few cutscenes but not during gameplay. When making a decision that affects your good and evil allignment a few chords play, but I'd hardly call that music.
At it's core, Darkwatch is a paint by numbers shooter. It presents the typical array of enemies which have to be dealt with using the typical array of weapons. At times, the enemy selection gets painfully boring as you are forced to mow down dozens of the same one after the other. Even on the rare occasions that a new enemy is thrown into the mix, that too gets boring in a few short minutes. This can safely be attributed to the fact that you have to fight enemy types in clumps. There is rarely any mix-up of what you'll be fighting. After going through dozens of sickle-wielding Reapers, this is typically followed by a couple of flying Banshees and then some explosive barrel carrying Keggers to finish the whole affair. And it certainly doesn't help that there are only ten enemy types through the entire game. Of these, two are restricted to individual levels, another two only make a handful of appearances through the entire game, and one doesn't even come into play until the latter half of the story. So this effectively cuts down the enemy types to five for the first half and six for the last half.
Of course the fact that instead of trying to find different ways of upping the difficulty, High Moon has instead opted to just continually increase the number of onscreen enemies doesn't help the situation any. Then there's also the fact that enemies will respawn all over the place, meaning the area you just cleared out will fill up with enemies and put you in the middle of a killzone. But in the end, it still accomplishes the same thing (cheap deaths and aggravation). Then you've got to deal with the way that the game throws powered up enemies at you without explaining where they're coming from. In certain segments “ghost” versions of enemies will pop up. That means you'll sometimes be facing off against ghost zombies (or would that be zombie ghosts?), which makes no sense at all.
In addition to the typical arsenal of shotguns, rifles, pistols, rocket launchers, crossbows and sniper rifles, Cross has access to abilities granted by his vampirism. Not only is he protected by a “blood shield” (think the regenerating shields from Halo), he is able to double jump and use other abilities as determined by his alignment. These range from increasing the damage of firearms or melee attacks to shooting out chain lightning and sucking souls out of people. In the later stages of the game these can be extremely helpful, especially when you've got dozens of howling zombies heading right at you. Due to the alignment factor, not all of these abilities will be available on a single playthrough, but it is pretty easy to get exactly what you want since it tells you right in the manual about the powers. During the in-game segments that determine your alignment (such as sucking the vampiric poison out of someone or just killing them), the game even goes so far as to label the actions as “Good” or “Bad” in bold letters as if we didn't know the differance.
Aside from the typical run and gun action of the game, you'll get to jump on your trusty steed (which is also a vampire… No, I'm not kidding) for some old fashioned train chasing. These segments are actually pretty fun because your pistol doesn't need reloading and enemies have a harder time hitting Jericho. The other vehicle (used for all of one mission thankfully) is basically a steam powered dune buggy with Gatling guns attached to it. The controls are horribly imprecise and sluggish to respond, it becomes airborne by running over small objects and the guns are about as accurate as the doomsday prophecies the tabloids are constantly printing.
I can't deny that this game had an awesome concept, but unfortunately High Moon Studios completely missed the two most crucial first person shooter elements; spot-on hit detection and level design. It makes me grateful that I bought this game for only twelve dollars rather shelling out thirty bucks for a crappy Halo clone.
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