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Time travel is one of those gimmick concepts that just seems really hard to mess up when it comes to entertainment.  Star Trek has done time travel to death, and yet it always seems entertaining.  Hiro Nakamura is rather amusing to watch as he ponders over what is right and wrong when it comes to his time travel powers.  Even Jean Claude Van Damme was somewhat entertaining in Timecop.  With all of that in mind, I was ready to play through Darkest of Days, mixes in police work with time travel and the visiting of several historical periods in time.  Unfortunately, it seems that time travel can be made to be more of a chore than entertainment at times.

Darkest of Days puts you in the shoes of a guy that goes by the name Morris.  While fighting during Custer’s Last Stand, you are injured, and about to be killed, when a bubble appears and a man in a tech suit comes out to rescue your character from certain death.  It seems that because there is no record of our character actually being at Custer’s Last Stand, we are an enigma, and thereby snatched from time to be used as an enforcer for time travel.  Again, think back to Timecop and you get the idea, except that you boss is a mysterious woman, and the company is called KronoTeK.

Your assistance was needed as someone has been altering the past, putting figures of significance in harm’s way.  No, no one that is famous is ever in danger, but more like everyday people that you have to rescue, because of the ripples they affect in the time stream.  These people take you to several points in history, including World War I, World War II, the Civil War and Pompeii.

Reading into that, it seems like this game should be a no brainer.  Time travel, old school weapons, and new school weapons, along with watching how the touted engine can render these large scoped battles.   However, the ambition seems to be lost in-between the design phase and the finished product.  While time travel should be exciting and different, all the battlefields seem strangely familiar.  Occasionally a few textures change, but when I come across the same fence from the Civil War in the fields of Pompeii, there are some serious design flaws in the game.

Each of the period weapons were fun to use, and really left you hanging from time to time, as it takes a bit to load a single shot musket.  I really liked the sound and details in the older weapons.  A lot more care seemed to go into these weapons vs. the terrible sounding futuristic weapons.  When I got my first shot at using an assault rifle, I was ready to lay down the carnage, but the assault rifle sounded rather tame, like a house cat, instead of the lion it should have been.

When you get close up on a character, there is a fair amount of detail in the faces, like scars, blemishes and other items.  However, you are never really close enough to anyone to appreciate the details.    The same can go towards the uniforms that everyone is wearing as well.  The Civil War uniforms really show a lot of detail to the point that you know who the important people are on the battlefield by their different look.  Other items really show off the graphical power of the engine, like heavy duty PhysX details including volumetric fog effects and the leaves and debris flowing in the wind.  Battles encompass hundreds of participants, making you feel as if you are part of a huge war machine.

Darkest of Days also employs a very nifty mechanic that will limit a person’s ability to spray and pray when it comes to attacking enemies.  Every now and then while on a battlefield, you will see enemies that are encased in a blue aura.  These are people that have to survive the battles they are in.  Kill them and it hurts your upgrade points score, as well as summoning enemy agents in to prevent you from righting time.  I really had to watch my fire as I wounded the blue targets, while killing the others.

Bugs are a huge problem to get past in Darkest of Days.  For one, the stability of the title is lacking on the PC side.  I have had the title crash at least seven times, with anything from random errors, to one time crashing my video driver.  Enemy AI also suffer from bad programming, as some will run right up to you, turn around and attack a wholly different direction.  Having hundreds of people on the field of battle will do you no good if they show the same amount of intelligence as Forrest Gump.  While not bugs, the entire nature of the maps kills me as you feel you are in a big, open world styled game, but you run into invisible walls everywhere, or a knee high fence that you cannot jump.  These are the gaming conventions of several years ago, not now.  It just feels half finished, similar to a tech demo.

In the end that is what Darkest of Days feels like, an extended tech demo.  The ideas are all there, they just falter when it comes to the implementation stage.  If you would have showed me this title during an Nvidia tech demo for PhysX, I would have been impressed, but this is being marketed as a full product, and that is where the biggest issue comes into play.  The game just does not have a lot of fun in the box.

Darkest of Days strives to be a good game, with a lot of great ideas and a ton of design philosophy.  However, the end product is a mix of uninspired gameplay and instability in the client.  If it was not for the idea in principal that you can see there, the game would have scored lower, but as it stands, Darkest of Days gets 2 Aeropausonauts out of 5.
Check out Darkest of Days and other PC reviews at Test Freaks.