Darkest of Days

TerrorFirmer

Has anyone here played this game? It came out a fair few years back at this point, and a combination of poor reviews and unavailability for the Xbox in Europe led me to just pass it up despite having a pretty interesting premise.

The premise is pretty simple, you're a time traveling soldier sent to different eras to rescue people of historical importance from their battlefield fates, and so you travel from Ancient Rome to the American Civil War and the Eastern Front in WWI and a place or two else in between. The first thing I will note, is that despite its age, this game is an absolute hardware beast - worse than Crysis, which would explain a lot of the poor reviews based on the severe performance issues. I'm running an OC'd 3570K with a 3GB GTX590 and I still hit the low 30's in the midst of some action scenes at max settings. To its credit though, the game is actually fantastic looking.

The scripting isn't great, the voice acting is poor, the storyline is poorly executed - but the action is great, particularly in the Civil War campaign - charging through cornfields against confederate lines, up hills against cannon emplacements, and so on, is just brilliantly realized, right down to the little details of both enemy and friendly forces forming firing lines that work in unison. The atmosphere is actually just incredible with a huge amount of NPC's on screen at once. The trudging in between these encounters however is admittedly uninspired. Of course, every now and again, there's the option to use modern weaponry, such as being handed an assault rifle and being told to hold the union line until reinforcements can arrive. As much fun as it is, the majority of time using era weaponry actually adds a great deal to the aforementioned atmosphere.

A real underrated gem in my opinion, though it does unfortunately require fairly hefty hardware to run at max settings, which I do feel is a huge part of the atmosphere it creates. Great use of Physx as well. Could have been a much better game, but as it is, it's an interesting and novel idea that offers something a little new.