The Darkness II (2012)

Mediocre shooter with gimmicky demon attacks, worth playing because it's stylized so well though

Don't let the complaints of the other reviewer dissuade you. To address his complaints. The interface for knowing what gun you are swapping is unusual but not something you can't get used to. And the light parts only fuck up your vision if you insist on standing in the glowing spots. I experienced no bugs and didn't struggle to know which were the attack buttons.

The Darkness 2 is a great FPS that combines gangster themes with demons all done with a great art style and a story that is incredibly entertaining and rich in lore. If you dislike edgy, dark, gorey stuff though you should probably stop reading altogether and never touch this game.

Your character is a mob boss that has an evil demon of fantastic power inside him. This allows you to sprout tentacles which can do melee attacks, spawn locusts, pick up objects and hurl them at enemies with deadly force, or even eat enemies hearts straight out of their body to recovery hp (there's many entertaining gory kills), and about half a dozen other cool shit while your normal human arms do normal human things such as point and shoot conventional guns. Half the demon attacks are gimmicks that you'll probably never use. For example, you can have your tentacles hold guns which allows you to “quad-wield”, it's totally pointless as you never need that much firepower, and it wastes ammo and causes too much recoil. What is useful is very shallow: the locus swarm, for instance, is just a cooldown that releases a homing attack and 90% of the time you're never close enough to use the tentacles to grab or melee enemies. But for what it's worth it's a very entertaining set of gimmicks. The shooting itself is merely adequate: just gun-wielding mooks in tiny corridors.

The demon inside you makes you are vulnerable to bright lights. So sometimes you need to shoot out lights or stay in the shadows during fights, later enemies will learn about your weakness and be armed with flashlights in addition to fire arms. That's all very cool and lore-tastic but it's also very shallow (don't stand in the light, shoot the bad guy's flash light, viola!).

The styling for the environments is awesome, colorful, with plenty of cool locations (like an amusement park).

The writing is incredibly entertaining from the demon's little quips, to the way the story goes from a simple mob war to getting a cult involved that wants to steal your demon for their own ends and eventually meeting one very pissed off angel that wants your head on a platter. The world is so interesting I read literally every lore item I found and actively looked forward to discovering new ones.