By all rights, a turn-based strategy game set in an alternate history where zombie Nazi soldiers report to vampire generals and the good guys are a secret squad led by a werewolf should be both the best and goofiest game you have ever played. It definitely nails the goofy, but Operation Darkness falls well short of 'good', let alone 'best'. Yet, it is enjoyable in the same way that some find 'b movies' entertaining. It is awesomely bad.
The game begins as you take control of two British soldiers in the midst of World War II. Regardless of what you do, you end up badly injured at the end of the first mission. Thankfully, a mysterious squad arrives just in time for their leader to save you with a sketchy blood transfusion. The game then begins its stretch of long-winded text-based cut-scenes, explaining your rescue and what new powers you gained as a result. Though billed as a vampire versus werewolf spin on World War II, in truth your newfound 'wolf pack' squad is closer to X-Men. While you do get to control some werewolves, much of the squad has completely different special abilities to utilize. The game eventually adds Jack The Ripper and Van Helsing to the mix, and delivers a smart romantic interest with a German woman challenging your character's anti-German ranting. If the game lived up to the cool-factor of the fantasy-based story, this would be a must-have title. Unfortunately, they seemed content to stop thinking when they came up with the concept.
The camera system is easily the most damning issue with the game. Being the most unappealing 360 game visually, it is strange that developers chose a third-person view for the camera. Most strategy games, smartly, give you a wide angle on the battlefield to help you plan your attacks and set up defensive positions. Operation Darkness does not seem to care that you want to plan your battle, and give you an extremely tight shot focused on the character whose turn it is. This would be fine, if they allowed you to zoom out or easily raise the view of the camera to show your surroundings, but the game seems uninterested in showing you what you need to see. To be fair, they do allow you to swing the camera around somewhat, but the oversensitive controls makes it too difficult to use well, and the lack of zoom hinders it further.
The game plays just like every other turn-based strategy game, but too often ignores the 'strategy' portion of the genre. The issue is that the inept camera system makes it tough to figure out exactly where your enemies are on the map, and even harder to see what they are doing on their turns. The camera seems to jump and twitch at random between various members of their squad, as the turn-list on the right side of the screen never seems to match who is really making moves. When you do actually 'move' one of your characters on the field, you choose the spot to move and the direction you want them to face. The direction has no bearing on the effectiveness of your weapons or ability to avoid fire, so it is an annoying waste of time to select.
While the game does supply you with 'E' tags showing enemy position to assist you with your moves, it is far from foolproof. The tags fail to show distance to the enemy, so you are just as likely to head toward the furthest enemies as you are to walk right by one. Making matters worse, the tags randomly appear and disappear at various camera angles. It is just as tricky to figure out if you are heading towards a clear shot or one where the enemy is in cover. Rocks, trees, buildings and various destroyed vehicles litter the levels as cover, but the camera and seemingly invisible cover saves you just as often. Though the game lists a hit rate on your selected target, varying from 100 for up-close clean shots to low thirties for further targets partially covered, the rate shown is rarely reflects the damage you do. There are too many times when you will have a hit rate near perfect and do absolutely no damage, apparently because a twig from a nearby tree was covering them. The game at least stops you from taking unwise shots by not allowing you to fire a shot when the hit rate is at zero.
While you can easily arm your team with guns with varying degrees of range and grenades, it also lets you use your newfound werewolf powers as well as the team's other special abilities. The transformation itself is pathetic, as the game shows a glowing purple haze around you flash to white. When the white dissipates, tah-dah, you are a werewolf. In werewolf form, the distance you can move greatly increases and you have special slicing attacks to perform with your claws. Your character's 'MS' meter tracks just how long you remain in wolf form, steadily decreasing each time anyone on your team does anything. Several other members of your team also have 'MS attacks' to perform, including fireball throwing, that use their MS meter.
While cycling through enemies with the triggers works well for individual enemies, targeting vehicles is almost a game in itself. Too often you will find a tank seemingly within range, only to find the hit rate at zero when you auto-select them. Toying manually with the aiming system will frequently reveal that the auto-selection was just not highlighting the right portion of the vehicle to shoot. Somehow, the game makes unknown distinctions between shooting the front and sides of vehicles. Thankfully, the enemy has as much trouble with the battle mechanics as you do, so at least the busted gameplay is fair.
Perhaps just as annoying, each mission in the campaign plays out the same. The objectives always seem to be to not lose any major characters on your end, and kill all of the opposition. It is easy enough, though repetitive, at the start of the game, but the gradual increase in difficulty eventually makes it rather frustrating. Battles begin with a few vehicles or enemies on the map, quickly backed up by a full swarm of Nazi soldiers after you kill one. Just when you think you have won, the game remembers it has zombies, and thrusts you into a third battle wave against a combination of zombies and vampires.
No matter how well you stock-up your characters, the missions typically drag on to the point that you are forced to scavenge dead bodies for ammo and health kits. This can save you, but it can also lead to frustrating deaths since it typically leads you in the direction of the zombie swarm. The game also has a hard time distributing the turns for each team. You will often find a large string of your own team members for a dozen turns, and then go two dozen more taking constant fire from the enemy. The game never seems sure of how to allocate the turns, and your major characters will typically go two or three times more than the minor, replaceable ones. Since there is no in-battle saving, you often cruise along easily for forty-five minutes only to have a zombie Nazi swarm come in and kill off a major character, forcing you to restart.
They attempt to balance the third-wave annihilation by offering 'cover' moves for your team. Each turn you have the option of putting your character into one of three 'cover' modes. The two more effective options are attack and ambush, which can keep your team on the offensive during a barrage of enemy moves. The basic concept for attack and ambush are the same, the character set to either cover mode will fire at enemies within their weapon range. The difference is the trigger for each, with ambush firing triggered by enemy movement and attack triggered by teammate fire on an enemy within range.
The two modes work well together, leaving you the option to set up slick chain attacks against a mass of enemies when outnumbered. As the occasional friendly fire goof proves, it is not foolproof, though. Those in cover follow the rule a little too strictly. Having your sniper taking pot shots at tanks for two-points of damage only wastes valuable ammo. Still, it mostly works well, and combining the two cover modes over a decent portion of the map can be the difference between victory and starting a long battle over from the beginning. Even with this strong defense against the zombie Nazi squads, the game deals out far too many cheap deaths. It feels especially unfair that your game ends if certain characters die when the special skill of one of your squad mates is to revive dead members of your team. It is almost as though his powers are only good on characters that do not matter, which feels all too convenient to keeping the game's difficulty high.
The RPG elements of the game are a little too light to please the hardcore. While you earn experience on the battlefield, it comes far too easily. Characters earn experience for each time they do any damage to an enemy or vehicle, whether or not they defeat them. The game auto-assigns upgrades to characters when they level up. You only have the choices as to the characters' inventory and five swappable skill upgrades in the between-mission menu, which is antiquated. Think back to the earliest RPG you can, and it probably has a higher level of detail and functionality you get here. Each battle earns you 'kill points' based on your performance, which can be used to purchase new weapons and items in the supply depot. Purchasing items you want several of, like health restoration items, will give your thumb a workout. There is no option to select how many of an item you would like to purchase. Instead, you need to buy items one at a time; chewing up too much of your time that you would rather spend on the battlefield.
Adding items to a character will leave you thankful for the small capacity of each player's inventory. While it is a clunky system, the bigger issue is that the game forces you to make your weapon and inventory choices before the battle briefing. Hearing that you are about to run into armored vehicles and tanks does not do you much good when you already have most characters equipped with handguns. Thanks to the game's unrelenting difficulty, they do allow you to recruit replacement troops between missions. The game's lack of imagination comes shining through here, as the replacements all look like clones of each other.
The game deserves some kind of 'razzie award' for having the worst voice acting on the 360, and makes a serious run for worst of all time. It is the kind of ham-handed melodrama delivered with such poorly imagined European accents that gamers might think they are giving away voice actor gigs. The score for the game is an itchy, twitchy blend of techno beats and industrial rock. Somehow, the aggressively generic music sounds right at home here. The camera is not the only piece of visual garbage. The textures on the environments look so laughably bad that you are likely to find more realistic-looking visuals in a poor DS title. The minimalist presentation and horribly ugly character models look at least two generations behind, and the red splotches they attempt to pass off as blood are confusing at best.
The game does offer limited play over Live, with bare-bones co-op play for two to four players on the game's non-campaign levels. Unfortunately, watching your partners' turns is about as exciting as watching paint dry. The game does not show their menu flipping, showing all their moves in once at the end of the turn. With a sixty-second timer for each turn, you will not be waiting too long, but the static image of your teammate's character will leave you wondering if the game froze. The best feature of the Live modes is that you play with your saved characters (each player selecting three from their save), and do earn experience and new levels within the Live games. With twenty-seven missions to the campaign and another thirty-five for additional play either over Live or in your single-player game, if you can deal with the game's problems you will have a lot to do.
Thanks to its great concept and terrible execution, Operation Darkness is the very definition of a guilty pleasure game. It is like a movie based on a story by Guillermo del Torro, but Uwe Bol was left in charge of writing the script, casting the actors, and directing the film. Somehow, its few charms do make for an oddly addictive experience, but it is the kind of addiction you know is bad for you and you would not wish upon your worst enemy.
