Following the critically acclaimed ‘Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay', Starbreeze Studio's latest is the more succinctly named ‘The Darkness'. In it you play young Jackie Estacado, on the cusp of twenty-one and already a respected mafia hitman who has unfortunately drawn the ire of his crime boss uncle. After a failed attempt to close Jackie's account, Uncle Paulie sics every dirty cop and thug in town on his trail to finish the job. Luckily for Jackie, he has recently gained a few helping hands in the form of serpentine tentacles that shoot out of his back on command, after catching a touch of the ancient-unstoppable-evil-itis.

As a first-person action title, ‘The Darkness' is a shooter only in the sense that guns are available to you. As far as exacting vengeance goes, gunplay isn't nearly as satisfying as terrorising your foes with Jackie's demonic powers. Invoking the Darkness causes a pair of eager snake-like tentacles to spring forth to his side, instantly bolstering his pain threshold (not to mention self-confidence) as well as allowing you to see better in the dark. And you will wish to remain in the dark as much as possible as Jackie's newfangled abilities draw power from the shadows, and exposure to too much light weakens and eventually prevents you from calling upon the Darkness until you recover in the shade. So it follows that, as Jackie, you'll be smashing a lot of light bulbs throughout the bloody adventure – at least you have plenty of options of how you want to put the lights out.

Jackie's offensive powers begin with the ‘creeping dark' which allows you to remotely control a rogue tentacle as it slithers around on the ground and even along walls and ceilings to seek out its prey. This at times becomes an exercise in frustration as you can easily get stuck on angled surfaces, or become disoriented as you attempt to navigate through claustrophobic spaces without light or gravity to help you the ceiling apart from the floor. A ‘demon arm' that extends forth to skewer enemies, a pair of ‘darkness guns' that fire dark energy in place of bullets, and a ‘black hole' that can eliminate an entire roomful of enemies round out the novel set of demonic tricks up your sleeves. It's a visceral and satisfying repertoire of skills that never seems to get old as you enter the next room and proceed to devastate the crap out of it!

While you'll also use Jackie's powers during several scripted sequences to interact with the game's environments such as removing obstacles with the demon arm, or unlocking doors by sending the creeping dark through air vents, you'll mostly just enjoy the freedom of tearing your foes apart with them. Once you have killed an enemy, you can watch as Jackie's serpentine guardians tear out their heart and devour it. It's a grisly sight that actually has a practical purpose of increasing Jackie's Darkness levels to make him more powerful.

Tentacles aside, aligning with The Darkness also gives Jackie command of hound-sized 'darkling' creatures that can be summoned through dimensional rifts littered in every corner of NYC (who knew!?). The darklings come in four devious flavours, from a gunner that sets up a sentry gun to gleefully keep enemies at bay, to a berserker that prefers a more hands-on approach. Sadly, these minions end up being a lot less useful than they should be, as the satisfaction of unleashing them on enemies is often crippled by terrible path-finding. You are likely to have more success dragging a legless blind man drunk on rum across a busy freeway, not that you would.

With all these powers at your disposal, you'd be forgiven for expecting a formidable army between you and the end credits, but The Darkness disappoints in this department. There is a small school of enemy archetypes that you will battle over and over again. What's more (or less really), the enemy AI is quite limited across all difficulty levels and you will often find foes just standing about while you skewer their colleagues with Jackie's demon arm.

So far, the game may sound like a mixed bag of interesting ideas marred by several gameplay annoyances, and it is that. But to the developer's credit, The Darkness is an absolute joy to play through from beginning to end. The chief reason for this is that the simple revenge plot is well-executed and the world it exists in is wonderfully realised through believable dialogue, colourful and very human characters, and a surprising attention to detail at every turn.

The Darkness began life as a comic that ran in the mid-90s from Top Cow. The game clearly benefits from having this rich fiction to draw upon for its adaptation that concurrently explores the origin of the Darkness and chronicles Jackie's revenge on those that wronged him. With one of the writers of the original fiction onboard, the dialogue absolutely crackles with wit and pathos. This is brought to life by top-notch voice acting from a troupe of professional actors including HBO regulars Kirk Acevado and Lauren Ambrose as Jackie and Jenny respectively. And all this is spurred on by a fetching and mostly subtle soundtrack that ranges from haunting ambient tracks to industrial-metal...but there are moments in the game that will surprise you as all this comes together to deftly tug at your heart-strings.

The game renders several neighbourhoods of New York with amazing details, further adding to the immersive experience. No, it isn't an entirely open-ended experience like a Grand Theft Auto, but instead offers a handful of interesting environments, most of which are accessible from the two subway stations that Jackie finds himself commuting between. The subway also acts as a hub for Jackie to gather information as well as perform side quests when not attending to the strictly linear main quest. This works extremely well, and for all intents and purposes, creates a believable world for you to roam around in. My only gripe here is that as you emerge from the subway, the streets of New York are often devoid of pedestrians and you will often traverse through several city blocks without meeting another soul.

Optional side quests are plentiful in The Darkness, and while rarely deviating from the simple fetch or kill-all-the-goons formula, they serve to add more personality to incidental characters and make the world even more believable. There are also collectible items strewn around the environments for completists to indulge in. You can collect costumes for Jackie's darklings that can alter the instruments with which they comically dismember your foes. But even more gratifying are phone numbers you can seek out and dial at any of the working payphones, rewarding you with often hilarious and sometimes disturbing phone messages from the city residents. This is done by scouring the city for collectibles, or through keen-eyed observation of numbers listed on surrounding flyers or billboards. As well as unlocking extra content (ranging from entire issues of comic books to concept art) accessible from the main menu, you can also engage in a very long, odd conversation with the Keeper of Secrets.

The game's kitchen sink comes in the form of an online multiplayer mode in which you can battle up to 7 other combatants for victory. The usual game types are present here (the deathmatches, the CTF and a tag mode) but the twist is that, instead of having multiple Jackie Estacadas prodding each other with their demonic wangs, three different configurations are possible for multiplayer. You may all play as humans that run around killing each other with guns, or as darklings that has lightning-fast movement but suffers from weak constitution. The most popular configuration by far is the changeling mode where everyone can switch between human and darkling forms at will. Matches are often composed of hilarious bouts of retarded cats running at each other headfirst, followed by gangsters firing on each other. It's chaotic and fun, but lacks what it takes to be an enduring experience.