The dark, brutal, gothic title of 2007 brings Jackie Estacado back and he’s bringing The Darkness along. Based off of the comic series from Top Cow the sequel has a large bar to beat set by its predecessor- from the superb voice acting to controlling the darklings and the Darkness gameplay. There were many things to love about it.

The story takes place two years later and quite a bit happened: Jackie is now the Don of the Franchetti family, he learned how to control The Darkness and he is still plagued by memories of his girlfriend Jenny’s death that he witnessed. As the crime boss Jackie is walking target that rivals want to whack, in fact, he survives an assassination attempt which starts an entire mob war. As for controlling the power Jackie can’t take the credit himself a mysterious person Johnny Powell who is knowledgeable about The Darkness helps him out.

And on top of all of that drama, a secret society called the Brotherhood (once founded to destroy the The Darkness now) wants that power to themselves and The Darkness doesn’t like that Jackie knows how to control and it wants to out.

Things aren’t looking good for Jackie at all however he has a few new moves up his sleeve to tip the scales. He can perform executions, dual wield weapons and use the tentacles at the same time called “quad-wielding” and Jackie has access to an all new skill tree called “talent shrines”. The darklings make a return as well but instead of respawn a certain skilled darkling from a vital location. Only one follows you and it is pivotal in the storyline. The darkling can use weapons such as guns or a worker drill on enemies as well.

But the gameplay isn’t the only thing that changed. The colors are much brighter and the textures have a toon-shade  (or cel-shade) to give a more comic book feel. Which makes sense that Digital Extreme isn’t try to stray too far from what The Darkness used to be. Speaking of comics Paul Jenkins, who wrote for the comics and first Darkness, is penning the script for this title. So far, The Darkness II looks promising things are worse for Jackie which means it’s good for us.