#65: Darkwatch

Darkwatch

High Moon Studios

Initial release: August 16, 2005 (USA)
Platform: Sony PlayStation 2 (reviewed), Microsoft Xbox 

images c/o Mobygames (Xbox version)

Imagine if Wild Wild West and From Dusk ’til Dawn had a baby and peed on it and then Todd McFarlane turned it into a video game while he was suffering from a head injury. That’s Darkwatch.

There’s a certain aesthetic that I like to refer to as “90s comics.” You know the look: it’s Rob Liefeld and Kelley Jones, it’s the Azrael Batman suit or Captain America’s powered armor. It’s the aesthetic of Mortal Kombat in 1992 and Darksiders in 2010 and V Rising in 2022. It’s stupid, it's juvenile, and though it comes in and out of vogue, it just won’t die. Darkwatch revels in this aesthetic. Every aspect of the art design lives for this look. There are spikes and crosses and black leather everywhere. The enemy designs are ghoulish without being interesting. The plot is mind-blowingly insipid. And yet… it’s fun. Well, about as fun as an utterly brain-dead Halo clone can be. And that’s no joke: the 2-weapon limit, the regenerating shield/static health conceit, even a fucking warthog analog (running on steam power, no less) — it’s all here, and it’s not even trying to hide the influence.

The plot is pretty thin. Jericho Cross (ugh), a former Union deserter turned wanted outlaw, robs a train. Unfortunately the train he chose to rob belonged to the Darkwatch, an ancient organization dedicated to battling evil, and the cargo was a powerful vampire. After accidentally letting the vampire out and getting turned into one himself, Cross and Darkwatch agent Cassidy Sharp (ugh) head out to the Darkwatch outpost. Cassidy is killed along the way and her ghost remains to bug cross the rest of the game (in other words she’s Cortana.)

After a brutal training regimen, Cross joins the Darkwatch as part of his quest to reclaim his humanity, but the others distrust him for obvious reasons. After a few missions, his new partner, Tala (a Native American outlaw!) lures him into BAM SUDDEN UNEXPECTED SEX SCENE. (Of all the places I expected to see a sex scene in a game, an obscure PlayStation 2 shooter from the mid-2000s was not one of them.) In the heat of the moment Tala gets Cross to bite her. Shortly after that she betrays Darkwatch, monsters flood the joint, there’s a few final battles, the end.

It’s stupid. The whole game is just mindblowingly ludicrous on its face with its crazy spikes-and-crosses guns way ahead of what was available in 1876, desert steampunk goth vibe and the constant noise and screaming of the vampiric ghouls you’ll be mowing down en masse. And yet this thing was supposed to be the linchpin and kick-off point for a whole media franchise. Comic books, movies, you name it. For whatever reason, it never took off. It can’t be because it was too stupid, so what happened? I mean, why else would you get Jennifer Hale and Rose McGowan to sign on for this ridiculous thing unless you were planning on turning it into a franchise? And then just… not do that?

I guess I’m grateful, to be honest. I tend to dislike this aesthetic, but it was popular for quite some time whenever something “edgy” was called for, and the idea of an entire media franchise based on something as impressively insipid as Darkwatch is a little much. That’s not to say it’s not fun. Turn off your brain and hop in, it’s not terribly difficult on the lower settings so you can just go in and shoot things ’til you’re done. There are honestly worse shooters on the PlayStation 2, like… well… most of the Medal of Honor games. Aesthetics aside, it’s not bad looking either, with good detail and reasonably varied levels, with some cool setpieces. The music is generic to a default, though, other than the Ennio Morricone sample they clearly could only afford to license the first two seconds of.

Ultimately, though, it’s utterly forgettable. A competent Halo clone does not a blockbuster make, even though it apparently sold well; there simply isn’t really anything to set it apart from the pack, unless you really like everything to look like a goth kid’s belt.

-june❤