You’re a soldier in the battle of Little Big Horn.  It’s the last few moments and things are looking grim.  You’ve been shot, left straggling on the ground with only a pistol to defend yourself.  Custer on the hill above you has just been made a pincushion by a few hundred arrows.  The end it would seem is drawing near.  And then a big techno bubble appears and a Halo-looking dude steps out and brings you to the future.

Wait..  wha??

Therein lies the concept for Darkest of Days.  It’s sort of a Quantum Leap meets military entanglement time travel adventure that sets you (in the shoes of a cowboy soldier circa 1876) on a quest to fix hiccups in the time stream, ensuring the space/time continuum doesn’t swallow itself whole (and, one can assume, ensuring that Marty McFly’s mom hooks up with Crispin Glover).

You’ll be drafted into an organization that is trying to figure out why time is going all wonky.  Time travel is used rather brilliantly by historians to go back in time and solve the mysteries that have plagued us for centuries.  How Stonehenge was built, what happened to the Mayans, that sort of thing.  As you can probably guess there’s a strict no interference rule.  But now something has gone terribly wrong.  Certain people who should survive major wars are now dying on the frontlines.  This means you’ll need to costume up with period appropriate weapons and attire and save these folks on the battlefield, while trying to solve the mystery of who’s messing with the timeline.

As a fan of time/dimension travel nonsense, I can definitely vouch for the sci-fi nerd appeal to be found in Darkest of Days.  Bringing something like this to video games isn’t all too common, which is why it’s so surprising that they did time travel sci-fi so well with their first effort.  In a lot of ways the structure of the game almost reminded me of Eternal Darkness.  Both games have a nifty central mechanic that take you on a journey through history.  Unlike ED though, this game is about blowing shit up.

At its core, Darkest of Days is about battlefield combat.  Each mission will pit you against an army, andthat's exactly what it's going to feel like.  Whether fighting as part of a unit or going it alone you'll never for a second doubt that this is exactly what facing military might must feel like.  You’ll be facing more NPC’s at a time than you’ve ever seen before, tackling dozens (if not hundreds) of enemy soldiers at a time.  And while this may sound daunting, it never feels like Darkest of Days is unfairly throwing the kitchen sink at you.

Let me draw a little scenario for you just to show you what I mean:  You and your men are walking along a path.  You come upon a house with 6 or 7 German soldiers hunkered down in front.  You open fire.  Suddenly, you’re taking fire – but it’s not coming from those soldiers.  Up in the hill to your left are a half dozen Germans.  To escape the fire, you run through a field to your right, but running towards you in that field?  More Germans.  You take them out and sneak behind the house, surprising the Germans out front.

Every mission presents different situations and different challenges.  Sometimes you’ll  be sneaking through cornfields trying to go undetected.  Sometimes you’ll be charging across a battlefield while soldiers are dropping left and right.  This means you'll get a great deal of variety in terms of structure, a variety which is only enhanced by the games antiquated weapons.

Going period-specific and staying faithful to what was available (with a few notable future-weapon exceptions) kept the gameplay not only authentic but always fresh.  Using a musket in the civil war meant you’d get one shot off and need to spend 5 or 6 seconds reloading – a far cry from the automatic weapons available in the 20th century.  This meant that strategies needed to adapt not only for surroundings and missions, but time periods.

But alas, no game is ever perfect and Darkest of Days is no exception.  In rendering so many characters at once, frame rate issues were an inevitability.  And while they don’t pop up with any sort of game-wrecking regularity, they’re still far too consistent to go without a mention.

Some of the default control options really nagged at us too.  We appreciate that the team was trying to break the boundaries of what has come before in FPS games, but that’s no reason to mess with a control scheme that we’re all used to.  Instead of using the left stick click for running, they use it for crouch.  Holding that down while moving and aiming is just an uncomfortable mess, especially in a game that demanded so much stealthy crouching.

The other thing that surprised us was the total lack of multiplayer.  For a first person shooter to ship without multiplayer in 2009 is downright mind-boggling – especially when the game is all about battlefield combat.  Toss in a few well-designed maps set in different time periods and Darkest of Days might actually have given the Battlefield/Battlefront empires a run for their money.

Very few games have broached the subject of time travel properly – it’s what’s at the core of this game, and  it nails it dead on.  As if that wasn’t enough, the team at 8monkey Labs proved to the world that their Marmoset Engine could do battlefield combat in a way that’s never felt more real.  If you’re a history buff, a time travel nut or a strategy gamer with a taste for FPS, Darkest of Days is something you should definitely check out.  This game has sleeper hit written all over it.

Yay! This is exactly how time travel in a video game should be.  Doctor Who liscensees, take notes.  Battlefields feel epic.  Most strategy we've seen in an FPS since the first Ghost Recon.
Nay! Frame rate issues and poor default controls bring the experience down a touch.  No multiplayer makes sad panda sad.

For those of you who really hate reading, or only learned to read numbers: 8/10

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