


Chances are that an exploding enemy ran up behind you, or that the stick of dynamite you threw bounced off of something close and blew you up.
#Darkwatch game weapons full
In this game you will die many, many times for no apparent reason… you’ll just be running along in the middle of a fire fight with close to full health and a full shield and then BAM! you’ll be dead. As with all FPS games, you have almost zero spatial awareness: you can see what is right in front of you but nothing on the periphery. One of the main problems, I think, is that enemies can attack you from any side. Unfortunately, Darkwatch falls short of being a really fun game and ends up alternating between boring and frustrating. So we have all the right elements here: great art, good sound, and well-implemented (if somewhat unoriginal) controls and mechanics. The sound design is pretty good too: as you move you can hear the subtle clinking of your spurs as well as the gurgling and groaning of approaching enemies. Though the game is not scary at all, the environments set the tone very well: there are a lot of really nice moonlit scenes in the game, complete with shafts of light and wisps of smoke.

Some of the cutscenes are also extremely well composed. Though most of the game takes place at night, the environments are lit well and diverse, and the art is stylized without looking cartoony. The levels and enemies all look fantastic, and the animations are really well done. The best thing I can say about Darkwatch is that it has really nice art and sound. Darkwatch doesn’t seem to do a lot of lock-on assistance for you, but I found the controls smooth and intuitive. As with most console FPS games, you control with both analog sticks and use the triggers to shoot. Actually, they’ve done a good enough job of copying Halo that the mechanics remain pretty fun within Darkwatch. It’s very clear that the designers of Darkwatch really liked Halo, but since the context of the game is so different, the places that were obviously copied didn’t really bother me. For example, you have a shield that automatically regenerates when you are not taking damage in the middle of the game, you’ll be asked to drive around on a physics-controlled dune buggy thing that drives exactly like the Halo Warthog you can only hold two weapons at once, and picking up a weapon causes you to drop your current one on the ground weapons include a crossbow, which sticks into enemies and then explodes, just like the Halo splinter gun all of the guns can be used as clubs for close-range melee attacks. Some of its mechanics are so similar to Halo that you might even call it a knock-off. Though the story is pretty trite and predictable, I have to give High Moon props for picking a setting that is all but nonexistent in games.ĭarkwatch definitely comes from the Halo school of FPS design. It’s an odd mix of Western themes and horror elements, but for the most part it works. The thing is, your enemies are always supernatural: skeletons with hatchets, floating banshees, etc. The game is filled with old west towns, trains getting hijacked, horseback riding, and gunfights in the desert. You must join a secret underground organization, the Darkwatch, to destroy the evil you have unwittingly unleashed and try to become human again. You play as Jericho Cross, an outlaw who picks the wrong train to hijack and ends up turning into a vampire. The game that shipped is not perfect, but the developers got a lot of things right.ĭarkwatch is best described as Old West Horror. During the development of Darkwatch, High Moon transitioned from being a subsidiary of Sammy to an independent studio, and I think that it is rather amazing that the transition didn’t doom this game. Repetitive level design and enemies overcome an interesting theme and excellent technical execution in this Halo-inspired Old West horror title.ĭarkwatch is a first-person shooter developed by High Moon Studios and published by Capcom.
